Salman Rushie’s MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN won the Best of the Booker designation–for the second time–as part of the prize’s 40th anniversary celebration. (He won a similar designation, the Booker of Bookers, after the 25 years of the prize.) South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes won the Caine Prize for African writing for her story, POISON is a piece about environmental disaster in Cape Town.Booker/GuardianBBC/Caine
Archives for July 2008
Madonna's Brother's Memoir Lands
Christopher Ciccone’s big revelation in Life With My Sister Madonna? “The singer really does love her husband, director Guy Ritchie, but, apparently, not as much as she loves her career and herself,” the AP says. To further summarize: “Ciccone’s memoir includes everything from gossip about Madonna’s sex life (she lost her virginity to a ‘guy named Russell’) to anecdotes about such ex-lovers as Sean Penn (Madonna called him a ‘paranoid control freak’) and Warren Beatty, who allegedly cornered Ciccone at a party and quizzed him intensely on what it was like to be gay…. “The book offers snapshots of Bruce […]
Personnel News
John Rudolph has been promoted to executive editor for Putnam Children’s, where has worked since August, 2001. Katie Henderson, previously at Bloomsbury, is now an associate editor at Doubleday. Ethan Friedman is leaving Collins Business. Lisa Grubka has left the William Morris Agency after six years to join Foundry Literary + Media.
On van de Wetering
Dutch crime writer Janwillem van de Wetering, 77, died on July 4, 2008, following a struggle with cancer. Best-known for his Amsterdam Cops series, Soho Press will be reissuing all 14 of van de Wetering’s Soho Crime novels in paperback, beginning this fall. Chicago Tribune book critic from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s Joseph Coates Jr., 75, died of lung cancer last week.Tribune
Charkin the Blog Book
Exact Editions learns via a permissions request that: “In September 2008 Pan Macmillan will publish Charkin Blog: the Archive, by Richard Charkin, an edited print-on-demand version of the blog he published while chairman of the company.”Exact Editions blog
Weltbild: Clarified In Translation
More information on the potential sale of Germany’s Weltbild, which a colleague there calls “the biggest fish to come on to the market” in some time, with sales of approximately 2 billion euros a year, and a market value estimated at about 1 billion euros a year. Holtzbrinck is already a 50-percent owner of Weltbild’s publishing company Droemer and is thought to be interested primarily in that piece of the empire. Separately, Weltbild is a 50-percent partner with Hugendubel in a holding company that operates multiple bookstore chains, including Hugendubel, Weltbild plus and Jokers, and most recently, they took over […]