Mohamed El-Erian won the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award for WHEN MARKETS COLLIDE: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change, “a timely alert to the fundamental changes taking place in today’s global economic and financial systems – and a call to action for investors who may fall victim to misinterpreting important signals.” CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein says the book “provides invaluable context for the global financial crisis and does so in an extremely accessible and compelling way.” FT editor Lionel Barber says the fourth winner of their award “is lucid and prescient in […]
National Book Award Finalists
Fiction nominees range from the 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for a book the AP calls “an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s” to debut novels from Rachel Kushner and Salvatore Scibona. The winners will be named November 19: FictionAleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press) NonfictionDrew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)Jane Mayer, The […]
Booker Bulletin: Adiga's White Tiger Wins
Per the traditional pattern, the favorite never wins. Debut novelist Aravind Adiga’s THE WHITE TIGER (William Morris’s big book at the London Book Fair in 2007 if you’ll recall) won the Booker Prize, just announced in London. Published by Atlantic Books in the UK (their first Booker victory) and just released in trade paperback by Free Press in the US, Adiga prevailed over bettor’s favorite, Sebastian Barry’s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE. It’s the third debut novel to win the prize. Chair of the judges Michael Portillo remarked, “The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy […]
Speeches Open Frankfurt Book Fair
At this morning’s opening press conference, Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos said, “The book sector follows its own rules, even in the face of the international financial crisis. This has been demonstrated by a survey of the heads of German publishing houses, which the Book Fair recently carried out in cooperation with the magazine buchreport. Although there were almost as many pessimists as optimists among the respondents, the majority opinion was that the business situation for publishers would remain consistent.” The biggest growth at this year’s show comes, not surprisingly, in the Digital Market Place in Hall 4.2, which […]
Booker Tonight; German Book Prize Prize
The naming of the Booker Prize winner tonight in London should spark some activity tomorrow at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is an unusual year, though, with low sales for all six shortlisted titles. All together, the six books have recorded lifetime sales of 32,342 copies via Nielsen Bookscan. Only Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs is available in paperback, and that book has sold the most of the six. Bookmakers Ladbrokes has Sebastian Barry’s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE as their 2-to-1 favorite, followed by Steve Toltz’s A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE at 6-to-1, but the bettor’s favorite generally does […]
Young Kundera an Informant?
The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes says in a report that when novelist Milan Kundera was 21, he told police a guest in his student dorm was a spy. The NYT says: “The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison.” Kundera said via a statement from French publisher Gallimard, “I object in the strongest manner to these accusations, which are pure lies.” Dvoracek suffered […]