Tracey Guest has been promoted to vice president, executive director of publicity for St. Martin’s. Franklin & Siegal Associates has added adult scouting to their work for Aschehoug in Norway, while continuing with YA and middle grade. Imprints Random House Children’s is launching a new graphic novel imprint, Random House Graphic, in fall 2019. Gina Gagliano will lead the line as publishing director. She joins from from First Second Books, where she was most recently the associate director, marketing & publicity. Gagliano says, “From awards to bestsellers, graphic novels have been advancing from success to success over the past decade. It’s the perfect time to […]
Authors
Junot Diaz Accused of Misconduct, and Responds, “I Take Responsibility for My Past”
Junot Diaz was accused of inappropriate behavior by author Zinzi Clemmons on Friday, writing on Twitter: “As a grad student, I invited Junot Diaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I’m far from the only one he’s done this 2, I refuse to be silent anymore.” Clemmons posted online after questioning Diaz from the audience at a Q&A session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where both were speaking. “This was my question [she wrote later […]
Legal: Writers Will Receive Money From Class Action Suit, 17 Years Later; Mockingbird Suits Continue In Two Places
It took only 17 years, but finally, the Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation has culminated this week with the issuance of settlement checks to nearly 2,500 freelance journalists totaling $9.5 million. The class action lawsuit, launched in 2001, claimed copyright infringement when about 600,000 newspaper articles were licensed to databases without the writers’ prior knowledge or permission. “We’ve been at the finish line for this lawsuit for a very long time, and so it is great that it’s finally happening,” Authors Guild president (and one of the named plaintiffs) James Gleick told the NYT. “But it’s also certainly a […]
Awards: Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Women’s Prize Shortlist, and More
The Los Angeles Times Book Prize announced the winners in eleven categories on Saturday night. The winners include: Fiction Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (Riverhead Books) The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart (Lenny/Random House) Current Interest Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (Viking) Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose Benjamin Taylor, The Hue and Cry at Our House (Penguin Books) YA Literature Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books) The rest of the winners included Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau (University of Chicago Press) for Biography; Leslie Stein’s Present (Drawn and Quarterly) for Graphic Novel/Comics; Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (Norton); Joyce Carol Oates’s A Book of American […]
People, Etc.
At Workman Publishing, Page Edmunds has been promoted to executive associate publisher; Danny Cooper becomes editor; Kylie McDonald move up to senior editor, director of cookbooks; Rachael Mt. Pleasant has been promoted to editor; Megan Nicolay becomes executive editor; and Maisie Tivnan moves up to executive editor. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced a number of recent promotions in their sales department. Colleen Murphy has been promoted to vp, special markets, mass market sales, and product development. Ed Spade, has been appointed director, digital sales, strategy and business development. James Phirman has been promoted to national accounts director, mass market, and Jaclyn Sassa moves up to associate sales representative. McGraw-Hill Education named Dr. […]
‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ Author Sues Tyndale
Alex Malarkey, the quadriplegic boy whose story comprised the 2010 bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which was later determined to be a fabrication concocted by his father, has sued Tyndale House for defamation, appropriation of his likeness, and exploitation of a person with a disability, all stemming from the core complaint that the book, was allegedly “based on lies.” According to the 32-page complaint filed in DuPage County, Illinois circuit court (and obtained by Courthouse News) Tyndale House “has made millions of dollars off Alex’s identity and an alleged autobiographical story of his life” but in spite […]