After last year’s unfortunate National Book Awards ceremony, when the one winner of color Jacqueline Woodson suffered emcee Daniel Handler’s “monstrously inappropriate and yes, racist…attempts at humor,” this year’s awards honored the most diverse set of authors to grace the NBA stage. The heavily-favored, agenda-setting Ta-Nehisi Coates won the nonfiction award and provided a powerful testimonial to the slain friend who inspired his book and the climate that African Americans still face very day — and he was joined by two other authors of color in the winner’s circle. In the biggest surprise of the evening, however, the one male fiction author […]
Archives for November 2015
Three NBA Nominees On Washington Post’s 10 Best of 2015
Before the awards were handed out Wednesday, the Washington Post issued their picks for the 10 best books of the year, including National Book Award nominees Ta-Nehisi Coates, Lauren Groff and Hanya Yanagihara. (Indeed, these three are already the clear leaders in our annual aggregation of the Best of the Best of Lists.) The full package includes the Post’s traditional larger lists of notable fiction and nonfiction, along with a number of category lists. The full top 10 are: Nonfiction Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick Future Crimes, Marc Goodman Negroland, Margo Jefferson Destiny […]
Briefs
Doubleday will publish New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer‘s topical DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right on January 19, 2016, with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies. In the book, Mayer asserts that “a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views [have] bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.” The work is based on five years of interviews and research. Oxford University Press Canada will move sales and distribution of their trade list from Publishers Group West as of January 1, with the Canadian Manda Group […]
14 Years and Growing, With An Anniversary Discount
Over at PublishersMarketplace.com we’re marking our 14th birthday (which must translate to some far larger number in internet-dog years, or what the NYT would probably call “unicorn time”). The site was actually our second start-up, coming about a year and a half after we started Publishers Lunch — which therefore turned 15 early this year, but since we didn’t know we were starting something enduring at the time, the precise date of origin remains a bit mysterious. To celebrate, we spent the last year (and more) completely rebuilding our server architecture and codebase to speed up the site and expand our […]
Awards: NBA, Costa, FT/McKinsey and More
The National Book Awards ceremony is tonight, in New York City. Once again, the event will be livestreamed for those who want to watch at home, with introductory remarks scheduled to begin at 7:40, and the presentation of this year’s winners set for around 8:50. Meanwhile, the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award was presented to Martin Ford for The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment (Basic Books/Oneworld). Christopher Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik won the Bracken Bower Prize in support of “young authors tackling emerging business themes” for their book proposal on Rethinking the Unthinkable. In nominations, the Costa Awards announced their shortlists […]
14 Years of Marketplace, and More to Come
Recognizing the muted state of the world right now, it is still that time of year when we take a brief pause from the daily to-do list to mark the 14th birthday of PublishersMarketplace.com. (That means that Publishers Lunch turned 15 early this year, but since we didn’t know we were starting something enduring at the time, the precise date of origin remains a bit mysterious.) As longtime readers/members know, we often try to launch some kind of new feature around our birthday — building on our initial pledge in 2001 to iterate and innovate on a continuing basis. (Yes, we […]