I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn't mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn't suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.

Continue Reading...

My heart sank, however, because I knew someone who was going to be very disappointed. My son. Four years earlier, I'd given Eli a subscription to Shonen Jump as a birthday present. It was a gift that kept on giving. My son has unimpeachable bona fides as a member of the digital generation, swimming in a sea of texts and video games and YouTube channels as effortlessly and naturally as a dolphin in the South Pacific, but I'm not sure I ever saw him more happy or content or intently transfixed as he was on those days when a new Shonen Jump arrived. He would curl up on our living room couch with the gloriously fat magazine -- sometimes several hundred pages in length -- and devour the latest adventures of Naruto and One Piece and Bleach.

Continue Reading...

Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement -- which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles -- seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the 18th century.)

We're so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer's livelihood that it's difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it. Yet we may need to start doing just that.

Our current copyright laws and (often ham-fisted) attempts to enforce them have many critics, but you don't see a lot of people advocating their complete eradication. They don't really need to. The biggest threat to copyright comes from the advent of digital reproduction, which has made piracy much, much easier. Reform could well be beside the point; copyright seems poised to die the death of a million cut-and-pastes.

Continue Reading...

Attorney General Steve Bullock's announcement Tuesday follows investigations by "60 Minutes" and author Jon Krakauer into inaccuracies in the book and spending by the Bozeman, Mont.-based Central Asia Institute.

Bullock oversees nonprofit corporations operating in the state. He has been in contact with attorneys for the agency, and they have pledged their full cooperation, he said in a statement to The Associated Press.

"While looking into this issue, my office will not jump to any conclusions -- but we have a responsibility to make sure charitable assets are used for their intended purposes," he said in the statement.

"Three Cups of Tea" was released in 2006 and sold more than 3 million copies. That notoriety helped Mortenson grow the Central Asia Institute by generating more than $50 million in donations, Krakauer said.

According to the charity's website, it has "successfully established over 170 schools" and helped educate over 68,000 students, with an emphasis on girls' education.

Continue Reading...

Mortenson is a former trauma nurse who began working to educate children in impoverished tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1990s. "Three Cups of Tea," his first book, was written with David Oliver Relin and first published in 2006, becoming a longtime nonfiction bestseller when the paperback was released in 2007. The book is closely linked with the Central Asia Institute (CAI), a charity started by Mortenson to build schools in the area. Mortenson, a popular and charismatic speaker, pursues an intensive schedule of media and public appearances, selling books by the crateful and collecting donations for CAI.

Continue Reading...

Eisler told Jason Pinter at the Daily Beast that he'd been exasperated by the way his previous publishers had marketed his books -- everything from boring covers to a failure to understand something called "automatic resonance." Eisler has also done the math (which he lays out in considerable detail for Pinter) and believes that, as handsome as the two-book deal St. Martin's offered him was, in the long term he can make more money on his own.

Other successful conventionally published genre writers -- the most celebrated of whom is J.A. Konrath -- have mined their out-of-print backlist for self-published e-book sales and done well. This week, the estate of Dame Catherine Cookson, a bestselling author in days of yore, announced that it will be selling 91 titles from her backlist exclusively for Kindle, largely because conventional publishers haven't shown much interest in reprinting them.

Continue Reading...

"The Greek Seaman" is the third of Howett's self-published, straight-to-Kindle affairs, and it probably would not have drawn much attention had it not been for a blog called Big Al's Books and Pals. On March 16, Big Al reviewed "Seaman" and gave it the most positive review the writer could muster:

"If you read 'The Greek Seaman' from the start until you click next page for the last time I think you’ll find the story compelling and interesting. The culture shock felt by the newlywed bride, Katy, who finds herself far from her native England, living on a cargo ship with her seaman husband Don is a good story in itself ...

Continue Reading...

I know! Shocking, right? Frey says that he expects to "get blasted" for this. The press has happily joined him in rubbing its hands together over the prospect, deploying words like "controversial" and "firestorm" in stories that Frey promptly posts to his website. "I tried to write a radical book. I'm releasing it in a radical way," Frey told the New York Post. So it's possible his Christ might be a skateboarder, too.

Continue Reading...

Whether these features will mean much to the average e-book reader, however, is another matter. Sales of e-books have grown by triple-digit rates in the past year, and industry experts predict no immediate end to the expansion, given that e-reader devices and tablet computers are expected to be popular gifts this holiday season. For every person I've met who swears she will never be lured away from her beloved print books, there's another who raves about finally reading "Middlemarch" on his smart phone during his daily wait for the bus and someone else who reports devouring twice as many books as she did before she got a Kindle.

Continue Reading...

Like "American Idol," which is a symbol of decadent liberal elitism. And, for some reason, "Murphy Brown," because inviting Dan Quayle comparisons is a really good idea. And the films "Knocked Up," "Juno," and "The 40 Year Old Virgin," which Palin likes because they are pro-marriage and pro-babies, even though godless Hollywood liberal elites made them.

The book is also about how Levi Johnston is still a craven, awful monster. And babies Tripp and Trig are still little accidental angels that everyone is very happy were not aborted. And the Tea Parties are good and Michelle Obama is an awful, embittered reverse-racist.

Continue Reading...

According to promotional material, the book, "Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America" by James Duffy, argues that Lindbergh was the target of a "vicious personal vendetta by President Roosevelt" that "blighted his reputation forever." FDR's campaign, the book argues, also amounted to a "modern-day playbook for the Left and their attack on those who speak out against them."

We can't fully judge the book until we've read it. But the book jacket explicitly says:

This groundbreaking book reveals: ... Why the popular belief that Lindbergh was an anti–Semite is absolutely wrong

Continue Reading...

Random House announced Wednesday that, effective Jan. 3, Meacham will "acquire and edit a select number of nonfiction titles each year."

Meacham's biography of Andrew Jackson, "American Lion," was released by Random House in 2008 and won a Pulitzer.

The 41-year-old Meacham was editor of Newsweek from 2006 until last summer. His other books include "Franklin and Winston" and "American Gospel."

Random House recently hired another popular author-editor, Ruch Reichl, formerly of Gourmet magazine.

Continue Reading...

But book banning isn't the only form censorship takes, and schools and libraries aren't the only places where it happens. As reported in Publishers Weekly, the Texas Appeals Court last week heard an important but little-known case filed against Carla Main, author of "Bulldozed: 'Kelo,' Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land," and her publisher, the conservative press Encounter Books. The plaintiff, developer H. Walker Royall, claims that Main has defamed him and wants her book yanked off the market and any future printings curtailed. Royall has also attempted to sue a newspaper that reviewed the book and even a law professor who provided a back-cover endorsement. (The latter case has already been dismissed.)

Continue Reading...

In a memo to employees, the publisher of The Star-Ledger of Newark says the newspaper is expected to lose about $10 million this year. The newspaper lost about $9 million last year.

Publisher Richard Vezza writes that full-time employees will be offered a buyout that will pay them one year's salary plus medical benefits. Employees will have 45 days to make a decision.

Employees hired before Jan. 1, 2006 will be eligible. In the memo, Vezza says he hasn't set a target number for the buyouts.

Vezza also wrote in the memo that salaries would be adjusted and some job duties could be combined.

In 2008, more than 300 employees took buyouts.

Continue Reading...

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. "To the End of the Land" is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. "To the End of the Land" is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

Continue Reading...

If you have any contact with the publishing world, you probably hear some version of the story above every day. What's most striking, however, about the many, many conversations I've had about e-books, innovations in self-publishing and the emergence of publicity venues like social networking is how difficult it is to stay focused on what all of this means for readers. No matter how hard you try, within five minutes the talk turns inexorably back to how agents, editors and publishers will suffer in the coming cataclysmic change -- and, above all, how gloriously liberating it will be for authors.

Continue Reading...

If you're the type who savors a little schadenfreude now and then, or if you have designs on writing a book of your own, I invite you to click here to read the full and gory details of my first, and presumably last experience in publishing.

The short version goes like this:

The original "Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel" was published in 2004. In spite of horrible, sales-crushing in-store placement (I challenge you to find the "aviation" section in any Barnes & Noble franchise) and a depressing lack of presence at airports, the book was moderately successful. Reviews were unanimously positive, and Amazon gave it "Best Travel Book of 2004" honors. It remains in print.

Continue Reading...

The law, the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act, expands efforts to identify countries where press freedom is being violated. The law is named after Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by militants in Pakistan in 2002.

The law expands an annual report on human rights practices to include information about media treatment, and identify countries where the media is being repressed.

Obama said the law would be a signal to governments around the world that their actions, including treatment of the media, are being watched.

He was joined for the signing ceremony in the Oval Office by Pearl's widow, Mariane, and Pearl's parents and son.

Continue Reading...

Josh Green at the Atlantic points out that this sounds a lot like a book by Peggy Noonan, called "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today."

But I don't think it's a true rip-off. Peggy, after all, is the East Coast elitist who originally called "bullshit" on the Palin phenomenon. Sarah wouldn't steal from her.

No, it's just that both of them work from the "word salad" approach to political punditry. Noonan picks the fancy words and Palin picks the simple words. But when you are crafting a title for your glorious ode to this wonderful country, there are really only a few words to choose from!

Go ahead, try to come up with your own Peggy Noonan/Sarah Palin book of platitudes. It's harder than it looks! Here's the best I could do:

Continue Reading...

This is not, to say the least, very realistic, as Jason Pinter would no doubt concur. Writing last week in the Huffington Post, Pinter, an author whose résumé includes jobs in publishing at "several major houses," recounted his difficulties in persuading his female colleagues to publish a book by Chris Jericho, a professional wrestler. "Pitching Jericho's book to my editorial board was like pitching iPads to the Amish," he complains, despite the fact that Jericho had an enviable "platform" -- the publishing-world term for regular TV and radio gigs. His co-workers had simply never heard of the guy.

Continue Reading...