New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson picks his ten favorite books of the year (with four votes for the some of the top contenders for our Best of the Best of 2010 list): 1. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen 2. Nox, Anne Carson 3. The Anthology of Rap, ed. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois 4. The Professor and Other Writings, Terry Castle 5. Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey 6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot 7. The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis 8. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, trans. Lydia Davis 9. The Possessed, Elif Batuman 10. And the Pursuit of […]
Archives for December 2010
People, Etc.
Oxford University Press announces, via Publishing Trends, that publisher of trade and academic books Niko Pfund will take on the additional position of interim president of OUP USA. The University of California Press has hired Alison Mudditt as its new executive director, taking over next month when Lynne Withey retires. She had been executive vice president in charge of higher education programs at SAGE Publications. (According to the LAT, the job pays $244,900.) Simon & Schuster associate publisher since 2004 Aileen Boyle is leaving the company at the end of the year to attend graduate school at NYU and spend […]
Bookselling: Northern Lights May Close, Palin Books Defaced
Duluth, MN store Northern Lights Books & Gifts has been on the market since August with no buyer yet. Owner Anita Zager tells the local paper she will close the store when her lease expires next February if a buyer does not emerge. Zager says she is exiting due to both family concerns and competition from e-books. “It’s kind of a Gutenberg moment,” she says. “If we had the ability to sell e-books to our customers, it would be different.”Duluth News Tribune At the Borders store at the Indianapolis airport, copies of books by both Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck […]
More Vaporware? Txtr Said to be Scrppd
Slashgear says that a former employee of Germany’s Txtr says that their planned ereader “has been quietly ditched while the company attempts to work on its software ebookstore business.”Slashgear
More Top 10 Picks, and Starting the Best of the Best of 2010
Yesterday the NYT posted their top ten books of the year. This time around the list overlaps with just three of their individual critics’ top 10 lists (whereas last year’s top 10 included five critics’ favorites). For the second year in a row, critic Dwight Garner’s nonfiction-focused choices were completely shut out from the overall top 10. The fiction list is surprising for its inclusion of two collections of previously-published stories: FictionFreedom, by Jonathan FranzenThe New Yorker Stories, by Ann BeattieRoom, by Emma DonoghueSelected Stories, by William TrevorA Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan NonfictionApollo’s Angels: A History […]
People, Awards, Announcements, Etc.
Courtney Young has been promoted to senior editor for Portfolio, Sentinel, and Current. At HarperCollins, David Sweeney has been promoted to vp, special markets responsible for mail order, retail, wholesale and premium, taking on added responsibility of leading the premium sales team. Alexandra Harris‘s ROMANTIC MODERNS: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, won the Guardian First Book Award. Melville House has agreed to publish the winner of the new Paris Literary Prize, to be given by the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company to a previously unpublished writer working in English. The web site for […]