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Total U.S. book production reached an all-time high of 195,000 titles in 2004, an increase of 14 percent from the previous year, according to a recent study by R.R. Bowker, the publisher of the Books in Print database and the official agency for assigning ISBNs in the United States.
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) recently announced that it will join the newly formed Literary Ventures Fund (LVF) to support small presses with both funding and marketing expertise. The organizations hope the merger will raise the profile of literary works published by independent presses.
Cliff Becker, the director of literature at the National Endowment of the Arts, died on May 17 of a heart attack. He was 40 years old.
The papers of Norman Mailer were recently purchased by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Nearly five hundred boxes, weighing more than twenty-thousand pounds, filled with unpublished stories, journals, essays, and screenplays, as well as manuscripts of nearly all of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's forty books, will be shipped to the Ransom Center early in the summer.
When I stepped off the plane in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1997, I found a 60-year-old Hunter S. Thompson waiting for me in a convertible Cadillac blasting Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” at full volume. I was terrified; he was giddy. He was playing the song because it was a part of the soundtrack put together for the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that was scheduled to hit theaters the following summer, and he could not have been happier.
The University of Iowa recently named fiction writer Lan Samantha Chang as the new director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Chang, who currently teaches creative writing at Harvard, will begin at Iowa in January 2006.
The finalists for several literary awards were recently announced.
Fiction writers Richard Bausch, Lan Samantha Chang, Ben Marcus, and Jim Shepard have been chosen as finalists for the directorship of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Each has been asked to present a public reading at the University of Iowa.
Apart from brief interludes on The Oprah Winfrey Show and NBC’s Today, books don’t often end up on U.S. television. The recent launch of the Quill Awards—a new national book award program sponsored by Reed Business Information and NBC that will include a televised ceremony in October—may have authors feeling like celebrities, but an entire network show devoted to the written word is still a rarity. Not so in the United Kingdom, where several programs are proving that literature can make compelling television.
The National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization composed of 600 book critics and reviewers from across the country, recently announced the finalists for the 2004 book awards.
