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Malachy McCourt, the creative nonfiction writer, actor, and brother of Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt, recently announced that he is seeking the Green Party nomination to run for governor of New York.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters recently inducted poet Frank Bidart and fiction writers Paul Auster and Lorrie Moore into the 250-member organization.
The NCAA college basketball tournament recently ended, but the second annual Tournament of Books—a literary showdown between sixteen novels sponsored by the Morning News and Powells.com—is still going strong.
Readers who prefer to buy books from the big online stores—Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble—now have another option.
Lagardère SCA, the French conglomerate that in February purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner, Inc. for $537.5 million, recently announced that the U.S. book division’s new name is Hachette Book Group USA.
Luis Alberto Urrea and Piers Vitebsky were recently named winners of the 2006 Kiriyama Prize. Urrea won in fiction for his novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (Little, Brown) and Vitebsky won in creative nonfiction for his book The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Houghton Mifflin). The winners split the $30,000 award.
Led by council speaker Christine Quinn, members of the New York City Council recently honored poet John Ashbery for his “literary and cultural contributions” by designating April 7 as “John Ashbery Day” in the city.
Last month Businessweek, the Web site of the weekly business magazine, published a list of the ten best cities in the United States for artists, including creative writers. Los Angeles topped the list, followed by Santa Fe, New Mexico; Carson City, Nevada; New York City; Kingston, New York; Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, and Ventura, California; Nashville; Boulder, Colorado; San Francisco; and Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York.
Fiction writers Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Jim Harrison, Harper Lee, and Annie Proulx were recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 250-member organization was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts."
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest continuously run poetry bookstore in the United States, was recently sold by owner Louisa Solano.
During the next several months, a number of festivals, exhibitions, and publications will mark the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth. Beckett, the poet, novelist, and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin on April 13, 1906.
At this year’s London Book Fair, which was held in early March, novelist Margaret Atwood introduced the LongPen, a device she designed that allows authors to sign books for readers who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Margaret Atwood's invention, the LongPen, which the author unveiled at last year's London Book Fair, will be used at a record store and several bookstores in the United States, Canada, and England, the London Free Press reported today.
Poet Rita Dove was recently named the winner of the $50,000 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for Literature.
Barnes & Noble, Inc. recently announced the winners of the 2005 Discover Great New Writers Awards. Uzodinma Iweala won in fiction for his novel Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins) and Nathaniel Fick won in nonfiction for his memoir One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin).
Time Warner Inc., the company that owns America Online, HBO, and Warner Bros. Entertainment, among other media and entertainment businesses, recently announced the sale of its book publishing division, Time Warner Book Group, to the French company Lagardère SCA for $537.5 million.
The Chicago Tribune recently announced that its Sunday book section will switch to a tabloid format. The move provides less space for book review coverage, and is intended to lower costs by reducing the amount of newsprint used.
A Turkish court recently dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk for insulting “Turkishness” in a comment on the country’s history. In February 2005 Pamuk told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger that Turkey has yet to confront both the Armenian genocide during World War I and violence in the country’s Kurdish southeast in the 1980s and '90s
