James Salter to Receive 2012 PEN/Malamud Award

James Salter

James Salter has been selected to receive the 25^th annual PEN/Malamud Award. Given annually since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, this award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction.

Salter is regarded as one of the finest living practitioners of fiction by his fellow writers, by critics, and by the lucky readers familiar with his work. Robert Burke, writing in the Bloomsbury Review, called him “one of the best writers in this country,” and Publishers Weekly has called him, “the author of some of the most esteemed fiction of the past three decades.”

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Orange to cease sponsorship of Fiction Prize

Kate Mosse

| By Benedicte Page

Orange will not renew its title sponsorship of The Women’s Prize for Fiction after this year’s award, to be made on 30th May.

The mobile services company, which has been the award’s sponsor since the prize was first set up 17 years ago, is to focus on its film industry sponsorship going forward.

Kate Mosse, co-founder and honorary director of the Prize (pictured), said she was “in active discussions with a number of potential new sponsors” and was hopeful of being able to announce a replacement by the end of the summer.

Mosse told The Bookseller: “It sounds daft but we’re very excited about the future of the prize going forward. It is very, very unusual for a massive arts sponsorship like this to come onto the market, it has great value, and this is a moment to be looking to the future, that’s how the business community has reacted.”

She added: “Orange has put millions into the book market, not just the Prize, but also in literacy and library projects, and for that they deserve a massive pat on the back. Now our aim is to grow the Prize and we’re looking for a sponsor interested in engaging not just in the UK but internationally.”

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Marable on James Tait Black shortlist

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

|By Katie Allen

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and critic Manning Marable has been shortlisted in the biography category for this year’s James Tait Black Prizes.

His Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Allen Lane) was published three days after his death in April 2011, and he was awarded the Pulitzer posthumously. It joins Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson (OUP); The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy (Faber); and Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries (Chatto), winner of the 2011 Wolfson History Prize, complete the list.

Man Booker-shortlisted debut Snowdrops by A D Miller (Atlantic) is one of four shortlisted in the fiction category, which also comprises Solace by Belinda McKeon (Picador); You and I by Padgett Powell (Serpents Tail); and There But For The by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton).

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‘Original’ Caine Prize shortlist revealed

 

Bernardine Evaristo

|By Charlotte Williams

The shortlist for the £10,000 Caine Prize includes stories by authors from Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The five stories on the shortlist, which looks to reward the best of short African fiction published worldwide, are “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde, first published in Mirabilia Review; “Urban Zoning” by Billy Kahoa, published in McSweeney’s; “Love on Trial” by Stanley Kenani, published in For Honour and Other Stories (eKhaya/Random House Struik); “La Salle de Depart” by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo from online journal “Prick of the Spindle”, and “Hunter Emmanuel” by Constance Myburgh from magazine Jungle Jim. The judges received 122 entries from 14 countries.

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The sound and fury of book-prize brouhaha leaves literature nowhere

Arguably insouciant … How would Christopher Hitchens have reacted to his final book's failure to win an Orwell prize? Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

As the fuss surrounding the Pulitzer and Orwell prizes shows, book awards are increasingly more about hype than substance.

By Robert McCrum

The great literary boom of 1980 to 2010 is over, but its glittering prizes still linger, like discarded party favours the morning after the night before. Hardly a day goes by without some new titbit of literary prize gossip, or speculation.

Last week, it was the brouhaha over the news that this year’s Pulitzer prize, one of the premier US literary trophies, would not be awarded in the fiction category.

Then came crowd-pleasing advance publicity for the People’s book prize (promoted by Frederick Forsyth and the late Beryl Bainbridge).

And on Wednesday, new depths were plumbed in reports that the Orwell prize jury had “snubbed” the late Christopher Hitchens by not shortlisting his final book of essays, Arguably. (I bet they’re shaking their heads up on Parnassus about that one.)

Really, it’s a shame Hitchens is no longer around to make hay with the ideas that: a) he was troubled by prizes; b) he had somehow always hankered after the Orwell trophy; and c) there can be any meaning whatever in handing out posthumous awards to books whose authors are beyond the reach of lunch, dinner, and especially critics.

 

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Just How Much Does a Pulitzer Prize Help a Book’s Sales?

By Gabe Habash

Part of the outcry over the lack of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction selection this year relates to the sales increase that each year’s winner inevitably receives, and how that windfall will be absent in 2012. But just how big of a sales increase does a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel experience? Using Nielsen BookScan, PW took a look at the last five winners of the fiction prize—A Visit from the Goon Squad, Tinkers, Olive Kitteridge, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Road—and the effects the win had on sales.

The trade paperback for Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad (Random House) was released just four weeks before its Pulitzer victory in April 2011. Weekly sales of the book immediately tripled following the announcement—in the week leading up to the announcement, the book sold 3,800 copies; the next week, after the announcement, the book sold 9,578 at the outlets tracked by BookScan (about 70% of print sales). Sales then hovered around 10,000 copies per week until June, and the book finally dipped under 5,000 copies per week in the week ending September 11, 2011. On average, following the Pulitzer, Goon Squad’s weekly sales for a three month period were triple what they were before the prize. To date, the book has sold 280,000 copies in trade paperback at outlets followed by BookScan. It should be noted that none of these figures includes e-book sales, which would’ve likely figured into Egan’s novel’s sales most prominently out of all the past winners.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers perhaps benefitted the most from winning the Pulitzer. Published in early January 2010 by Bellevue Literary Press, the book had only sold 1,120 copies at BookScan-tracked outlets before the Pulitzer announcement. To date, it has now sold 360,000 trade paperback copies in outlets followed by BookScan. The weekly spike is also astounding: in the week before the announcement, Tinkers sold only 40 copies. The next week, immediately following its Pulitzer victory, it sold 1,042 copies, doubling its total sales in a seven-day span. The following week, sales continued to climb, reaching 6,131 copies, and weekly sales remained steady around 5,000 until January 2011, 10 months after it won the Pulitzer.

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Pulitzer should take a leaf out of the Orange prize’s book

David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King was among those shortlisted for the Pulitzer fiction prize. Photograph: Gary Hannabarger/Corbis

A rickety shortlist doomed Pulitzer judges’ attempts to award a fiction prize this year – they should see how the Orange prize does it.

By Robert McCrum

The news that this year’s Pulitzer prize, one of the premier US literary trophies, now in its 96th year, decided not to award a prize in the category of fiction (or, indeed, in editorial writing) was coolly described by the New York Times as “notable”.

However, in some quarters, there’s already been some predictable hand-wringing. Jonathan Galassi, CEO of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a poet, translator and seasoned man of letters, with a distinguished track record of editorial excellence, has declared himself to be “shell-shocked” by this decision. No doubt there will be others who deplore a missed opportunity to promote new fiction and who raise that old, incendiary cry of The American Novel In Danger.

That – as I see it – would be hasty. There are at least three reasons to keep calm and carry on.

First, this quirky, ephemeral slight is not unprecedented. In 1977, the Pulitzer jury also chose to snub the contemporary American novel and declined to award a prize in the fiction category. The sky did not fall in, the sun rose over the East River, and New York publishing carried on, undiminished. From some points of view, it actually entered a long boom of magnificent remuneration and creativity from which it has only recently emerged.

Second, scrolling forward to 2012, whatever one wants to say about the state of the market (dire), or US bookselling in general (apparently in terminal decline), one commodity of which there is no dearth is talented – even great – American writers of all ages. Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Saul Bellow may be no more, but plenty of important writers have stepped forward to take their place. From Philip Roth, Paul Auster and Toni Morrison to Lorrie Moore, Marilynne Robinson and Jeffrey Eugenides, these are good times to be reading the American novel.

Publishers may be struggling to launch new talent – that’s true of the UK, too, by the way – but, backed up by a boom in writing schools and college literature courses, there’s still a lot of talent breaking through.

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Pulitzer Fiction Snub Has Book Publishers Fuming

By JULIE BOSMAN

Just when the publishing industry thought things couldn’t get any worse.

Days after the Department of Justice made the blockbuster announcement that it was suing five of the biggest book publishers in the business, the Pulitzer Prize board dropped its own bombshell on Monday: for the first time in 35 years, there would be no Pulitzer winner for fiction.

Publishers, authors and booksellers howled in outrage, attacking the Pulitzer board on Twitter and on blogs (“how can this be?” was the Tweet from the Boulder Bookstore). Winning the Pulitzer for fiction offers an unparalleled boon in prestige and sales, a rare splashy opportunity to bring a novel in front of the public and to permanently change the course of a writer’s career. Not to choose a winner, the industry raged, was an insult.

It was the 11th time in the prize’s history that a winner in fiction was not chosen, said Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, but the first time since 1977. That year, the jury recommended “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean but the board declined to give the award.

Usually, a winner is selected in a two-step process. A three-member fiction jury reviews hundreds of books (341, in this case), comes up with three finalists and sends those finalists to the Pulitzer board.

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Three for Bloomsbury on Orange shortlist

|By  Lisa Campbell

Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury has three titles on this year’s Orange Prize shortlist, while novels published by independent publishers account for five of the six nominations.

The Bloomsbury titles are Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence. Two other indie titles come from the Canadian author Esi Edugyan with Half Blood Blues, published by Serpent’s Tail, while Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies is from Atlantic Books. The sole entrant from a Big Four publisher is Irish author Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, which is published by the Random House imprint Jonathan Cape.

Miller is the only début novelist on the shortlist and Ozick is the most published of the runners: Foreign Bodies is her seventh book.

 

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Pulitzer Prize for history, but not for fiction

Members of the Philadelphia Inquirer staff react Monday after learning of their Pulitzer Prize for Public Service from their series on School Violence in Philadelphia. This year, no Pulitzer prize for fiction was given.
Michael Bryant/Philadelphia Inquirer/Reuters

The late Manning Marable won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for history, honored for a Malcolm X book. But no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction.

By Hillel Italie

The late Manning Marable won the Pulitzer Prize for history Monday, honored for a Malcolm X book he worked on for decades, but did not live to see published. For the first time in 35 years, no fiction prize was given.

David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” a novel assembled from notes he left behind at the time of his suicide in 2008, was among the finalists for fiction. Also cited were Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia” and Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams.” Johnson’s novel “Tree of Smoke” was a Pulitzer finalist in 2008.

“The main reason is that no one of the three entries received a majority, and thus after lengthy consideration, no prize was awarded,” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “There were multiple factors involved in these decisions, and we don’t discuss in detail why a prize is given or not given.”

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