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Peabody Award-winning journalist Nate Thayer reports the Atlantic offered to publish one of his essays—for free; Julian Barnes claims authors are driven by market forces to write about sex; Coffee House Press announced it's expanding its catalog to include books of essays and creative nonfiction; and other news.
Rebecca McClanahan's poem, which was published in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, will resonate with anyone in Boston later this week for the annual AWP conference and book fair. "Annual Conference: 8,000 Writers Expected" is read by the poet and visualized by Donald Devet.
The VIDA count for 2012 has been published, which spotlights gender disparity among publications; Paul Ford considers Amazon's foggy corporate culture; LynDee Walker shares unconventional tips on dealing with rejection; and other news.
Is it typical to give a publisher rights for all media? Is there a standard practice regarding adaptation rights into other media and/or translation rights when initially signing a contract?
I’ve seen contracts that grant the publisher all rights to the book, including all media. Most frequently such contracts are used when there is no agent involved. Sometimes the author signs one because she would rather have someone other than herself responsible for the rights, or because she lacks firsthand knowledge of industry standards. Independent and university presses, which are wonderful for many reasons, are most often responsible for contracts such as these because they publish unagented work and because their rights income is on a smaller scale, so they like to have as many rights as they can. However, at small presses there is not always someone specifically assigned to pursue selling foreign, audio, first-serial, and especially media-subsidiary rights. There are now also other rights to consider because of evolving technology, like e-book rights and enhanced e-book rights. Publishing is undergoing many changes, so it’s a crucial time for authors to protect themselves from contracts that assign rights to a publisher not equipped to exploit them.
The recipients of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes in fiction, nonfiction, and drama were announced this morning at Yale University. Each of the nine winners of the new prize will receive $150,000 to support their writing.
The winners in fiction are Tom McCarthy, James Salter, and Zoë Wicomb; the winners in nonfiction are Adina Hoffman, Jonny Steinberg, and Jeremy Scahill; the winners in drama are Naomi Wallace, Steven Adly Guirgis, and Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Sponsored by Yale and established with a gift from the estate of the late writer Donald Windham, the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes recognize English-language writers at all stages of their careers. The prizes are named in honor of Windham and his longtime partner, the journalist and publisher Sandy M. Campbell. The prizes are administered by the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, which also houses Windham’s papers. The awards join a list of esteemed literary prizes already sponsored by Yale, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
“Yale is a place that hopes to inspire and recognize greatness in every field,” said Peter Salovey, president-elect of Yale University, in a press release. “The Windham Campbell Prizes allow us to fulfill that ambition in the field of world literature in ways we are only beginning to understand.”
There is no application process for the Windham Campbell Prizes. Established professionals in each category are asked to nominate names for consideration, and a selection committee meets at Yale to name up to nine writers to receive prizes.
The winners of the inaugural prizes will receive their awards at a ceremony at Yale during the Windham Campbell Literary Festival from September 10 to September 13 in New Haven.
“I look forward to the dialogue the winners will inspire on the Yale campus and around the world,” Salovey said. “We will learn much from our prize-winners, particularly in these first years of awarding the prize.”
In the video below, Salovey announces the prize and the first annual winners.
"Man is a mass of electrified clay!" Percy Shelley wrote a couple hundred years ago. Frances Ashcroft and Denis Noble, professors at the University of Oxford, discuss the science of how ions transmit electricity through the body as well as the more poetic aspects of electricity, including Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Mary Shelley's inspiration for Frakenstein, and more.
Amazon is reportedly looking to rent half-a-million square feet of office space in New York City; nineteen Charles Bukowski drawings were rediscovered at a book fair; Jillian Goodman considers Michelle Orange’s This is Running for Your Life; and other news.
Last night, during a ceremony at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its book awards for publishing year 2012.
D. A. Powell won in poetry for Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf); Ben Fountain won in fiction for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco); and Andrew Solomon won in nonfiction for Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner).
Leanne Shapton won the autobiography award for Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press); Robert A. Caro won the biography award with The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf); and Marina Warner won the criticism award for Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Belknap Press).
The winners were chosen by a panel of established literary critics from a list of thirty finalists announced this past January. The shortlist in poetry included David Ferry for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press); Lucia Perillo for On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press); Allan Peterson for Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books); and A. E. Stallings for Olives (Triquarterly). The finalists in fiction were Laurent Binet for HHhH, translated by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House); Lydia Millet for Magnificence (W. W. Norton); and Zadie Smith for NW (The Penguin Press).
The annual National Book Critics Circle awards are given for books published in the previous year. For more information about the awards, visit the NBCC website.
In the video below, watch the finalists read from their work at last night’s ceremony.
For your weekend viewing pleasure we present this 1963 documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, produced and directed by Terry Sanders, in which the late science fiction author (who was forty-three when the film was made) shares his thoughts on writing and perseverance: "You've got to be inspired and mad and excited and love it more than anything else in the world!"
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Denise Duhamel’s Blowout and Phillip Lopate’s Portrait Inside My Head, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
