Yesterday Serpent’s Tail announced that THE PASSPORT, Nobel winner Herta Mueller’s her first book in English translation, originally published by them in 1989, will be reissued October 19th as a $12.95 paperback. Macmillan tells Bloomberg that they are reprinting 5,000 hardcover copies each of the THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS (Northwestern University Press has the paperback rights, as noted yesterday, and is reprinting 20,000 copies) and THE APPOINTMENT, along with 20,000 paperbacks of the latter. Northwestern tells Bloomberg they are also negotiating to reprint TRAVELING ON ONE LEG. And the University of Nebraska Press reminded the trade they have Mueller’s […]
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Barnes & Noble's New Earnings Schedule Has Bookstore Comps Down 4.1 Percent
Barnes & Noble announced results for their new fiscal quarter, aligned to dovetail with the just-acquired BN College. Reporting sales for the past nine weeks of the new quarter, same-store sales at BN fell 4.1 percent at $665 million, while results at BN.com rose 8 percent to $91 million. The retailer said that for the full fiscal 2010 quarter, they expect that comp-store sales decline to range between 1 percent and 3 percent–meaning they see sales improving from here. Of course those forward-looking comparisons are set against a lower bar–October is when book sales started to plunge last year as […]
Herta Müller Wins Nobel for Literature
The judges remained “Eurocentric” after all, picking the Romanian-born German novelist. They couldn’t resist her writing about the “landscape of the dispossessed” through “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.” Muller had jumped up in UK betting in recent days, driving speculation of a leak from the Swedish Academy. Her Impac winner The Land of the Green Plums looks to be available in the US from Northwestern University Press; 2002’s The Appointment looks available from Picador.Guardian
Hilary Mantel Breaks Favorite's Curse and Wins Booker for Wolf Hall
She squeaked by in a three-to-two vote among the judges, but the heavily-favored Mantel prevailed last night and took the Booker Prize. Chair of the judges James Naughtie said, “It wasn’t a unanimous decision. These things seldom are, but it was a decision with which we were all content. There was no blood on the carpet. We parted good friends.” It’s the first-ever Booker win for the UK’s Fourth Estate, and Holt is set to release the US edition next Tuesday. At the Huffington Post, Amy Hertz praises and congratulates her mentor and Mantel’s US editor, Jack Macrae. Mantel, who […]
Announcements: Hefty Printing for Wimpy Kid, and More
Abrams announced a four-million-copy laydown for Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days on Monday, October 12. And the publisher reports “more than 300,000 reservations” of copies. Separately, Hachette Book Group is expanding their distribution relationship with Chronicle Books (and Chronicle’s own roster of distribution clients) to include sales and distribution immediately in Latin America; and starting January 1 in the Middle East and Caribbean. In personnel news, Quill & Quire reported that Raincoast Books founder and ceo Allan MacDougall, 62, has stepped down. VP and business manager John Sawyer, “who had been handling most of the day-to-day operations for […]
People and Awards
Simon & Schuster UK group sales & marketing director Charlotte Robertson is leaving to join Aitken Alexander as an agent next year. At Cengage Learning, Ron Mobed has been hired as president of the academic andprofessional group, effective immediately, reporting to ceo Ronald Dunn. Previous president Charles Siegel is retiring. The National Book Foundation named their new list of “5 Under 35“: Ceridwen Dovey, Blood KinC. E. Morgan, All the LivingLydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantages of BreathingKaren Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by WolvesJosh Weil, The New Valley Ian Frazier won the Thurber Prize for American Humor […]