Oprah Winfrey’s revamped, Occasional Book Club 2.0 has selected Ayana Mathis‘ debut novel THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE (Knopf) as its second choice. The book was originally set for publication in mid-January but has been moved up to release today instead. As part of the announcement Oprah said: “The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away. I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.” Oprah had picked Cheryl Strayed’s WILD in June, following the book’s publication in March. At the time, she said the OBC2.0 would feature “several […]
Awards
People, Etc.
Patrick Mulligan has resigned from Gotham Books, to work full-time for Pop Chart Lab, a design startup he cofounded in 2010. He can be reached at patrick@popchartlab.com. Mark Short joins Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as svp and head of international markets. He was at Pearson. The Bookseller has updated their piece on United Agents’ acquisition of AP Watt: 12 of 16 AP Watt staffers are joining UA as part of the merger. In the UK, Christian publisher Lion Hudson will publish crime and women’s fiction aimed at a broader audience through a new imprint, Lion Fiction, set to launch in spring 2013. […]
People, Etc.
Midas Public Relations CEO Jacks Thomas will join Reed Exhibitions UK in January as senior exhibition director for the London Book Fair. LBF has been a Midas client for 10 years, and will remain so in the future. Kelly Welsh will join Putnam and Amy Einhorn Books as senior publicity manager on December 3. Previously she was publicity manager at Simon & Schuster’s trade imprint. Author and motivational speaker Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar, 86, died on Wednesday. Best known for his 1975 book SEE YOU AT THE TOP, the WSJ notes he “preached in the tradition of American self-help that stretched back […]
People, Etc.
The literary director of Albert Bonniers Forlag in Sweden Jonas Axelsson has elected to step down, effective immediately. Associate publishing director of Bonnier Group’s trade publishing division Jesper Monthan will take over on aa temporary basis while a search is conducted. Axelsson has also resigned from his other responsibilities within the Bonnier Group, including leading the Bonnier Group Agency. Frank Berrios has been promoted to editor for the Random House Children’s and Golden Books licensed publishing group, where Courtney Carbone has moved up to assistant editor. The Costa Awards shortlists were announced across five categories. Booker winner Hilary Mantel is […]
Favorites Erdrich, Boo, Win National Book Awards
The National Book Awards were presented Wednesday evening at Cipriani Wall Street. In keeping with the awards’ recognition of writers with a broad audience and larger reach, favorites Louise Erdrich and Katherine Boo won in the fiction and nonfiction categories. Accepting the nonfiction award for Behind The Beautiful Forevers, Boo said that if the prize were to mean anything, “it is that small stories in so-called hidden places matter because they implicate and complicate what we consider to be the larger story, which is the story of people who do […]
A Look At Tonight’s National Book Award Field
Predicting (or speculating on) who will win tonight’s National Book Awards is harder than usual, as the awards themselves are headed towards a process that will have broader resonance with readers. In past years, particularly for fiction, commercial success was often a deficit more than an advantage, but that may no longer apply. Among the fiction nominees, Nielsen Bookscan print sales data confirms Junot Diaz’s book as the most successful title in the marketplace, though a win for Diaz would make him the first person to win for a book of stories since Andrea Barrett’s 1996 award for Ship Fever and […]