Next: The Booker The Booker Prize will be awarded tomorrow night, and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip has risen to the bettors’ favorite, at 6-4 odds (aka 3-2). He started as a 20-1 longshot but now has overtaken Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. On the other hand, the “favourite” almost always loses. Among them: Last year Sarah Waters lost to Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss; Julian Barnes lost in 2005 to John Banville’s The Sea; David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas lost to Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty in 2004; Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood lost to DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little in […]

Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up   FICTION Debut Pushcart Prize winner and philosopher Clancy Martin’s HOW TO SELL, about […]

Lessing’s Reaction Doris Lessing told reporters yesterday after the announcement of her Noble victory: “I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise.… I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.” She also said, “This has been going on for 30 years. I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush.” Academy secretary Horace Engdahl told Reuters that “members of the academy had discussed her […]

Lessing Wins Nobel A jubilant HarperCollins booth at Frankfurt was celebrating the naming of Doris Lessing, 87, as the new Nobel laureate for literature. Harper published her most recent book, THE CLEFT, this summer, and has an extensive paperback backlist of Lessing through Perennial. The company publishes Lessing in the UK as well. Evans is represented by UK-based agent Anne Evans at the Jonathan Clowes Agency. Judges praised her for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.” Once again, all the “favorites” were passed over. Just earlier today, the AP was tipping Philip Roth, Amos Oz, and Haruki Murakami. And now […]

NBA Finalists If you haven’t already seen the lists, the National Book Award finalist were announced this morning: Fiction Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company) Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf) Nonfiction Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf) Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA) Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and […]

Hachette Will Widget Hachette Book Group USA is developing an OpenBook program to provide browsable and searchable online access to their titles, accompanied by book widgets. In keeping with model of other such publishers as Random House and HarperCollins, individuals will be able to search books in their entirety, and view a percentage of the text. The are working with LibreDigital as their technology partner, using their digital warehouse product. The company’s vp of digital media Maja Thomas says it’s “one initiative in our ongoing digital strategy, which includes planned upgrades to our Digital Asset Management system and the state-of-the-art […]