Vicki Lame has been promoted to associate editor at St. Martin’s. John Freeman, who was named acting editor of Granta after the departure of Alex Clark in May, has been made editor on a permanent basis, The Bookseller reports.http://www.thebookseller.com/news/99842-freeman-named-granta-editor-on-permanent-basis.html.rss Mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky, 75, died last Friday. Sarah Weinman rounds up the coverage and testimonials.
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The Reece Halsey North, Reece Halsey New York and Reece Halsey Paris literary agencies have melding into Kimberley Cameron & Associates, with the same staff and offices (new contacts are at the site: www.KimberleyCameron.com). Penguin UK managing director Helen Fraser will retire from the publisher at the end of the year. She is going to become chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust, and will also join the board of Frances Lincoln as a non-executive director. The Guardian Children’s Fiction prize has gone to Mal Peet‘s EXPOSURE.
More Mueller On the Way
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 […]
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 […]