Shine A Light

From the New York Times:

“Lorin Stein, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux whose youth belies his influence in the publishing industry, was named the editor of The Paris Review, the prestigious literary magazine, its board of directors said on Friday. Mr. Stein, 37, has edited several high-profile authors at Farrar, Straus; in 2007, three of the five fiction finalists for the National Book Award were works he edited. As editor of The Review, Mr. Stein will succeed Philip Gourevitch, the author and journalist who announced in November that he was stepping down.”

From Shelf Awareness: Winners of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Awards:

Fiction:

First prize: Victor Ladato, for Mathilda Savitch (FSG)
Second prize: Barbara Johnson, for More of This World or Maybe Another (HarperPerennial)
Third prize: C.E. Morgan, for All the Living (FSG)

Nonfiction:

First prize: Dave Cullen, for Columbine (Twelve)
Second prize: Toby Lester, for The Fourth Part of the World (Free Press)
Third prize: Neil White, for In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (Morrow)

Allan Lokos, author of “Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living,” will appear at Borders, 17200 Royalton Road in Strongsville, at 7 p.m. March 18 for a discussion and book signing. For more informatin, call Borders at 440-846-1144.

The nominees for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been announced:

The nominees are Sherman Alexie for War Dances (Grove Press); Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (Harper); Lorraine M. López for Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk Press); Lorrie Moore for A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf); and Colson Whitehead for Sag Harbor (Doubleday).

The Los Angeles Times has announced the finalists for the 2009 Book Prize.

From Shelf Awareness: Nominees for the 2009 Strand Magazine Critics Awards, recognizing excellence in mystery fiction:

Best Novel:

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Ballantine)
Life Sentences by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
The Renegades by T. Jefferson Parker (Dutton)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Best First Novel:

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown)
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press)
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin)
Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Harper)

Also, the Strand gave its lifetime achievement award to Elmore Leonard “for his huge body of mystery and crime novels.” The winners of the Critics Awards will be announced on July 7.

Also from Shelf Awareness: The winners of the Books for a Better Life Awards, sponsored by the Southern New York Chapter of the National MS Society:

The Christian Science Monitor offers five tales of plagiarism.

From the Bookseller:

“J K Rowling has said that she intends to apply to the court to have a claim of plagiarism made against her by the estate of the late Adrian Jacobs dismissed on the grounds that it is without merit. She described the accusation “as not only unfounded but absurd” and said she was “saddened that yet another claim” has been made about the source of the Harry Potter books. Rowling was cited overnight alongside her UK publisher Bloomsbury in a lawsuit originally made public in June on behalf of the estate of Jacobs, who died in 1997. The claim alleges that Rowling borrowed ideas from the previously unknown book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard. Bloomsbury dismissed the allegations as “unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue” back in June.”

And more from the Associated Press

From Reuters via Publishers Weekly: “TV pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau has been sentenced to a month in jail for urging his fans to flood a judge’s email inbox with appeals on his behalf.”

From Shelf Awareness:

Michael Burlingame won the $50,000 Lincoln Prize for his two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. The prize, which is sponsored by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, will be awarded April 27 in New York City. “Burlingame’s massive biography of Abraham Lincoln is a landmark of American historical scholarship,” Lehrman said. “Nothing surpasses Burlingame’s comprehensive and detailed research into the entire life of Lincoln. His prose and arguments are always clear and straightforward, even if some judgments will be vigorously debated.” The shortlist for this year’s Lincoln Prize included John Brown’s War Against Slavery by Robert McGlone and A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers.

From The New York Times:

“… Now, two weeks after Mr. Salinger’s death at age 91, the letters are being made public. They are likely to be among the first batch of many such correspondences, given Mr. Salinger’s history of letter-writing, that will surface and deepen — or perhaps even alter — the public’s understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most puzzling, and puzzled about, literary lights. The letters furnish what may be the most specific description yet of Mr. Salinger’s writing habits in the years after 1965, when he stopped publishing. Even in the 1980s, he describes a highly disciplined writing regimen, starting each morning at 6, never later than 7, and not brooking interruption, “unless absolutely necessary or convenient.” This in-his-own-words account may bolster the conviction and hope of some that he left additional works behind. …”

From the New York Times:

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

From AP:

Anne Rice is giving the video book a try. The author of “Interview With a Vampire,” “The Vampire Lestat” and many other favorites has agreed to terms with the video book company Vook on a multimedia edition of “The Master of Rampling Gate,” a vampire story published in Redbook magazine in 1984 and set in an England mansion in the 19th century.

from Learned Owl press releases:

Joyce Dyer, author of Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, will sign her book on Saturday, March 6 from 1 – 3 p.m. at the Learned Owl Book Shop (204 N. Main St, Hudson). Goosetown is the story of Dyer’s search to rediscover her childhood neighborhood, and with it, forgotten pieces of her childhood. Joyce Dyer is director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram College, and John S. Kenyon Professor of English. She is the author of three books, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey, and Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town. Dyer has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 1998 Appalachian Book of The Year Award and the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction.

On Saturday, March 27, Ralph Pfingsten will be giving a talk on his new book, The History of the Ravenna Arsenal, at Laurel Lake Retirement Community (200 Laurel Lake Drive, Hudson). Pfingsten’s book covers the history of the arsenal in detail – its inception in 1940, its service to our country, and its present uses. More than 900 photographs and drawings illustrate the narrative. The talk will be accompanied by slides of many of these photos. Ralph Pfingsten became familiar with the Ravenna Arsenal while doing biological surveys for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. This gave him access into these highly restricted facilities, where he was able to document what he saw. This is the fourth book that Pfingsten has written. His other books include; Salamanders of Ohio, The History of John Marshall High School and From Rockport to Westpark. The History of the Ravenna Arsenal is published by the Northern Ohio Railway Museum. Pfingsten has been a volunteer there for over 20 years, and all proceeds from the sale of the book benefit the museum. Books will be available for sale at the talk, and also at the Learned Owl Book Shop (204 N. Main St, Hudson).

Saturday, February 27, The Learned Owl Book Shop will celebrate new authors in our local community by hosting an afternoon of book signing, brainstorming and refreshments, featuring locally written books for adults and children. Everyone is welcome to meet the authors, who will be signing their books in shifts from 11 – 5. Most of the children’s authors are scheduled from 11 – 1 p.m. The afternoon brainstorming session, an informal chat about the processes of writing and getting published, is also open to all, and runs from 2 – 3 p.m.

For more information on any of these events, contact The Learned Owl Book Shop at (330) 653-2252.

From Shelf Awareness:

And the winner is… 40 years later. The 22 authors on the Lost Man Booker Prize longlist have waited a long time to contend for the best novel published in 1970. Included among this distinguished group are Patrick O’Brian, Iris Murdoch, Ruth Rendell and David Lodge. The Guardian reported that the new award “aims to commemorate the works that ‘fell through the net’ in 1970 after changes to the Booker rules. In 1971, two years after the prize was first given, it ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became, as it is now, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. The date on which the award was given was also moved from April to November, creating a gap when a wealth of 1970 fiction could not be eligible.” The shortlist will be announced in March and the winner named in May. The longlist:

• The Hand Reared Boy by Brian Aldiss
• A Little of What You Fancy? by H.E. Bates
• The Birds on the Trees by Bawden
• A Place in England by Melvyn Bragg
• Down All the Days by Christy Brown
• Bomber by Len Deighton
• Troubles by J.G. Farrell
• The Circle by Elaine Feinstein
• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
• A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill
• I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill
• A Domestic Animal by Francis King
• The Fire Dwellers by Margaret Laurence
• Out of the Shelter by David Lodge
• A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch
• Fireflies by Shiva Naipaul
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
• Head to Toe by Joe Orton
• Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault
• A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• The Vivisector by Patrick White