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The winners of the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs) were recently announced. Given in sixty-five categories, the annual awards are intended to bring increased recognition to books published in the past year by independent and university presses as well as self-published titles.
On Thursday, June 22, the Madison Square Park Conservancy launched a free series of summer readings in Madison Square Park, located between 23rd and 26th streets and Fifth and Madison avenues in New York City.
Three independent bookstores in the San Francisco Bay area have recently closed due to declining sales.
The 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships were recently awarded to twenty-seven poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.
Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Gary Shteyngart, and Colson Whitehead are among the authors who have participated in a reading series to raise money for a new library at Public School 107, an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York.
The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis recently announced the winners of the 2006 McKnight Artist Fellowships. The $25,000 fellowships are given in alternating years to Minnesota poets and writers of fiction and literary nonfiction.
Novelist Paul Auster recently won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. He received 50,000 euros (approximately $62,850).
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced today that Donald Hall will be the next U.S. poet laureate. He will succeed Ted Kooser, who has held the position since 2004.
The publishing and movie rights to John Steinbeck's early novels, previously held by Penguin and heirs of Steinbeck's widow Elaine, who died in 2003 at the age of 88, were recently awarded to the author's son and granddaughter by a federal judge in New York.
To celebrate its tenth anniversary, AbeBooks recently compiled a list of the ten most expensive used books that have been sold on its Web site since 1996. The list includes a first edition of The Hobbit, published in 1937. The book, one of only 1,500 copies printed, sold for $65,000. A copy of the first collection of John Donne’s poems, published in 1633, sold for $60,000. And an inscribed copy of George Orwell’s 1984 sold for $26,500.
