Category: words

Earlier this week Linda Grant, a features writer for The Guardian, won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her book “When I Lived in Modern Times.” Now she’s been accused of lifting passages of her novel from a recent history book about 1940s Palestine. – The Times (UK)

Herewith a primer on how to get your book dressed for success. – Inside.com

London columnist Linda Grant’s first novel, “When I Lived in Modern Times” won the UK’s Orange Prize, beating out Zadie Smith’s much-hyped “White Teeth.” Now in its fifth year, the Orange Prize was set up to celebrate women novelists from around the world, after the Booker Prize repeatedly overlooked women authors in its shortlists. – The Independent (UK)

Everyone was talking e-books at this year’s BookExpo. Well, almost everyone; a few subversives still linger: “I think the book is an amazing bit of technology,” Martin Amis asserted with his familiar, welterweight edge. “I like to write on my books, bend the pages, make little marks. I read with a pen in my hand, and I would like to be read with a pen in the reader’s hand. Reading a book is communing with the author. I think you need the page in your hand, the weight of it, as part of that process.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos predicts that “the advent of computer e-books would likely spell doom for independent booksellers since customers would not be coming to their stores to download reading material.” But Bezos’ dire prediction was made at a news conference and was different from the speech he had given earlier to the BookExpo convention reassuring booksellers that their business was safe from the likes of him. – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

That’s the message from this year’s BookExpo America (though there’s still plenty of worrying about the e-business) – Seattle Times

Attendees at this years BookExpo America shrugged off worries about electronic publishing, online bookselling and corporate consolidation of the business. Book publishing is in pretty good shape after all. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It’s something of an American publishing legend that back in 1928 book editor Maxwell Perkins cut 60,000 words from Thomas Wolfe’s manuscript to sculpt the masterpiece “Look Homeward, Angel.” This fall a restored version of Wolfe’s work will be published for the first time. “Some Wolfe lovers believe it will prove just how funny and irreverent Wolfe really was and how Perkins, a prim young editor who never used a curse stronger than “My God!,” got hold of one of our country’s most ambitious novels and cut out its heart.” – Washington Post

Independent booksellers can’t agree on much beyond who their common enemies are. But they have agreed on a website to help market their books – two websites, actually. But some worry that the indies have entered the fray too late. – New York Times

Speaking to the Book Expo America convention, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos “predicted that e-commerce probably would not take over the marketplace. He expects that 10 years from now, only about 15 percent of sales would take place online.” – Inside.com