Booker Prize Shortlist Announced
Six authors were recently shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. The prize, sponsored by the Man Group investment company, is given for the best novel of the year by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
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Booker Prize Longlist Announced
The 2005 Booker Prize longlist of 17 semi-finalists was recently announced. The £50,000 (approximately $90,600) prize, sponsored by the Man Group investment company, is given for the best novel of the year by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
Massachusetts Family Sues Author Augusten Burroughs
A lawsuit recently filed in Massachusetts accuses author Augusten
Burroughs of defamation, invasion of privacy, emotional distress, and
fraud. The lawsuit, filed by the Turcotte family, contends that
Burroughs’s memoir, Running With Scissors ( St. Martin’s Press,
2002), includes false information about themselves and the late Dr.
Rodolph Turcotte, a psychiatrist who took custody of Burroughs at age
9. Also named in the lawsuit are Burroughs’s editor, agent, and
publisher. The Turcotte family (changed to Finch in the book) is asking
that the book no longer be published as a work of nonfiction. They are
also requesting a public statement that it is not a memoir. Burroughs
has not commented on the lawsuit. A movie adaptation of Running With Scissors, featuring Annette Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow, is set to be released next year.
Washington Post Apologizes for Negative Book Review
The Washington Post recently published an Editor’s Note apologizing for its negative review of John Irving’s novel Until I Find You (Random House).
Frank O'Connor Prize Shortlist Announced
Six fiction writers were recently named to the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize shortlist.
U.S. Book Production Reaches All-Time High
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.
CLMP Merges With the Literary Ventures Fund
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, Director of Literature at the NEA, Dies of a Heart Attack
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.
Ransom Center Acquires Norman Mailer Archive
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.
In Memory of Hunter S. Thompson: Postcard From Louisville, Kentucky
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.
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