Appearances When Michelle Obama addresses the opening general session of the 2018 ALA Annual Conference on June 22, she will be joined on stage by Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden, who “will moderate a conversation.” Awards The Jewish Book Council’s $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature has gone to Ilana Kurshan’s memoir If All the Seas Were Ink. The Lambda Literary Award announced winners in 23 categories at an awards ceremony Monday night. Roxane Gay and Edmund White were awarded Lambda’s Trustee and Visionary Awards, respectively. Apple Updates As Bloomberg reported back in January, Apple’s forthcoming iOS 12 […]
Authors
Accountant Charged With Embezzling $3.4 Million From Donadio & Olson
A recently unsealed federal criminal complaint revealed that longtime Donadio & Olson accountant Darin Webb was charged earlier this month with embezzling $3.4 million from the literary agency between January 2011 and March 2018. According to the 5-page complaint, Webb, who was employed by Donadio & Olson as their bookkeeper since 2001, “used his position as the Agency’s bookkeeper to transfer more than $3.4 million of funds, belonging to the Agency and the Agency’s clients, from the Agency’s bank accounts to bank accounts that [he] controlled. In order to evade detection of his criminal conduct and carry out his scheme, […]
People, Etc.
Carole DeSanti will leave Viking, where she is vp, executive editor, on June 1 after more than 30 years with the company “achieving a singular mixture of critical and commercial success and modeling the importance of the fierce editorial advocacy she offered all of her authors,” according to Viking publisher Andrea Schulz. She added in the announcement: “Personally and professionally, I will miss Carole terribly – I have relied so much on the acuteness and the generosity of her editorial judgement, not to mention her excellent cold remedies – but I hope you will join me in wishing her well […]
Briefs: Tokarczuk Wins The Booker International, and More
Awards Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the Booker International Prize. (Riverhead is scheduled to publish in the US on August 24.) Initiatives Hachette Book Group has launched an online community for mystery and thriller fans, Novel Suspects. “The centerpiece will be the very best books in the genre–from HBG as well as all other publishers,” and promising to “fully integrate other publishers’ titles into the fabric of the site.” SVP marketing strategy Heather Fain calls it “a truly comprehensive catalog of all the books and authors [fans] love paired with fun and lighthearted short-form articles, listicles, videos and […]
People, Etc.: Roth Dies at 85
Philip Roth, 85, died Tuesday night in a New York hospital of congestive heart failure. The NYT calls him “the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th-century literature…. Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them.” Hillel Italie at the AP refers to Roth as […]
Cengage Authors Sue Over New Subscription Model
Textbooks authors David Knox and Caroline Schacht filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Cengage, alleging that the publisher’s forthcoming Cengage Unlimited subscription model breaks the “fundamental bargain struck” in their publishing agreements, and is designed “for the specific purpose of retaining a greater share of its revenue stream (and therefore reducing author royalty payments).” The plaintiffs seek class action status for their suit. More broadly, they also allege that since emerging from bankruptcy protection in 2014, “Cengage has trampled on its authors’ rights.” They charge that the company has diluted authors’ royalties on courseware packages, by […]