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The BBC World Service recently launched what could be the world's largest book club. Each month a new book of fiction will be selected, and a live discussion, led by Harriett Gilbert, will be broadcast to the BBC's radio audience of 150 million listeners on six continents.
The nominees for the 2002 Man Booker Prize were recently announced. The annual prize is given for the best novel published in the current year and is open to writers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth.
Witnesses looked on in anguish as the murky flood waters of the Vltava River surged over Prague, one of the world’s greatest literary cities-home of Kafka, Kundera, Hrabal, and Havel.
Don DeLillo is the author of twelve novels, including White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Mao II, and most recently, The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. He was born in 1936 and grew up in the Bronx.
The 16th annual Paris Writers Workshop wrapped up on July 5 after a week-long schedule of workshops, lectures, readings, and walking tours.
Poet and editor Dave Smith will resign in July from The Southern Review, the literary journal based at Louisiana State University that he has been co-editing since 1990. Smith, who turns 60 in December, will leave Baton Rouge and the literary post of his hero, the poet Robert Penn Warren who started the journal, for a Chair in Poetry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The move will allow him to remain in the South, his home and the inspiration for much of his work.
W. S. Merwin made his first appearance at the Village Voice bookstore on May 27, the same evening a hailstorm hit Paris. Merwin is the author of 20 books of poems, four books of prose, and nearly 20 books of translations, including one of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is scheduled for publication in October by Knopf.
When Amazon began selling used books alongside new titles in November 2000, top executives at the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers protested the practice, arguing that it pays nothing to writers and publishers. Nearly two years later, the online retail giant's successful marketing of used books has renewed the dispute.
The seventh annual Firecracker Alternative Book Awards, celebrating "insurrectionary culture that lights a fire under the complacent mainstream booty," were announced on May 3 at a ceremony in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The Library of Congress announced on April 25 that Billy Collins will serve a second term as U.S. poet laureate.
