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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.
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
The National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization composed of 500 book critics and reviewers from across the country, recently announced the finalists for the 2005 book awards. The winners in each category—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, criticism, and biography—will be named on March 3.
Lewis Lapham recently announced that he will step down as editor in chief of Harper’s magazine in the spring of 2006. He will remain with the monthly magazine as editor in chief emeritus, and will continue to write his “Notebook” column.
Borders, Inc. recently announced the nominees for the 2005 Original Voices Award in fiction. The $5,000 prize is given annually for an “innovative and ambitious work from a new and emerging talent, or a title that represents a new direction for an established author.”
In October the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a federal lawsuit against online search engine Google over its plans to digitally copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owners.
The National Book Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2005 National Book Awards.
Michael Korda, the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster since 1968, recently announced that he will leave the publishing company in December. Korda joined Simon & Schuster as editorial assistant to Henry Simon, the brother of company cofounder Richard Simon, in 1958.
John Glusman, vice president and editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, recently announced that he will leave the publishing company in December.
Microsoft recently announced the creation of MSN Book Search, an online service for digitally searching the text of previously published “books, academic materials, periodicals, and other print resources."
Irish novelist John Banville recently won the 2005 Booker Prize for The Sea (Picador). He received £50,000 (approximately $87,300). 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.
The University of Chicago recently acquired valuable archival material from the estate of the late Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.
The Special Collections Library at the University of Rochester recently acquired the archive of BOA Editions, Ltd., a nonprofit press that was founded in 1976 and has published more than 170 books of poetry.
A collection of T. S. Eliot’s unpublished correspondence with members of the Faber publishing family was recently sold at a London auction for $436,725. The collection included a set of 50 letters addressed to Tom Faber, the son of publisher Geoffrey Faber (and Eliot’s godson), which sold for $82,300.
The MacArthur Foundation recently announced that novelist Jonathan Lethem is among the 25 recipients of this year's "genius" fellowships. Each award is worth $500,000.
