Since academics generally don’t stand for the repression of writing and inciting of violence, University of Texas at Austin professor Denise Spellberg writes to the WSJ to insist the paper’s op-ed last week “falsely asserts that I am the ‘instigator'” of the cancellation by Random House of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. But her clarification makes her position pretty clear: “As an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life…. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty […]
Suskind Documents CIA Lie
Ron Suskind, author of THE WAY OF THE WORLD, includes former CIA head of the Near East division and deputy director of clandestine operations Rob Richer as one of his on-the-record sources for the assertion that the agency was ordered to fake a document to help support the Administration’s case for war in Iraq. As wagons were circled when the book was released, Richer said in a statement “I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book.” But Suskind has now posted […]
Publishing Terminology Primer
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor prepares a “guide to the arcane terminology of the book world” after realizing she uses a lot of industry jargon, from “dingbat” to “stet” to “pre-empt”, when teaching her students about the ins and outs of publishing. She doesn’t mince words about the meaning of out-of print: “The end.”Chronicle of Higher Ed
On Mahmoud Darwish, 67
The Palestinian poet, author and politician died Saturday night in Houston from complications following heart surgery. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning yesterday for the man he deemed “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project.”NYTGuardian
Awards Notes
Michael Chabon, Connie Willis and Ted Chiang are among the winners of this year’s Hugo Awards handed out Saturday night at the World Science Fiction convention in Denver. The Bookseller, taking a cue from the Booker Prize, has opened up voting on the “Diagram of Diagrams” for the oddest book title of the last 30 years.Hugo AwardsThe Bookseller
Nielsen Wants ISBNs for Each eFormat
In their role as exclusive UK ISBN registrar, Nielsen Book has issued a statement indicating they will exclude from their database titles that use a single ISBN to represent all e-book forms of a particular. In other words they are rejecting that practice that is currently favored by most large publishers, requiring the assignment of a different ISBN to each different electronic edition of the same title. As quoted from the statement in the Bookseller, Nielsen notes that “we acknowledge that [publishers'[ e-book initiatives to date may not have required per-format identification…. We believe that hardwiring bibliographic and identification practice […]