Granta looks for Best of Young British Novelists

 | By Charlotte Williams

Granta Magazine has opened submissions for the fourth edition of the Best of Young British Novelists list, which will be announced at the London Book Fair on 15th April 2013.

Authors who have made the list since its first edition in 1983 include Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Rose Tremain and Jeanette Winterson.

To be eligible for the 2013 list, candidates must be under 40 as of 18th April 2013, when the issue will be published. They must either have a book contract for a work of fiction, or already have a book-length work published. They must also have a British passport.

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Books to Film Forecast: Cloud Atlas, On the Road, Lawless

By Gabe Habash

There’s a slew of book-to-film news in light of Cannes 2012, going on right now. Let’s get to it.

*Cloud Atlas (which we put at #2 on our most anticipated book adaptations of 2012) has been bought by Warner Bros. for $20 million, after having been made for $101 million (and initially estimated at $170 million). The film is made by Matrix directors the Wachowski brothers and a 2 hour, 44 minute cut (with incomplete special effects) screened for buyers at Cannes to positive buzz. Cloud Atlas has been given a December 6 release date. It stars Tom Hanks, Ben Whishaw, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Grant, and Halle Berry.

*Also playing at Cannes is Killing Them Softly, the heist-and-mob picture from Andrew Dominik, whose first film was the masterful (PWxyz’s opinion) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The film is based on George V. Higgins’s Cogan’s Trade, written in 1974. The cast: Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini. Release is set for September 21. Check out the film’s first clip:

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Gay superheroes: Holy cow! Why is everyone in a hurry to out Batman?

Kapow … Will Batman become one of DC’s ‘most prominent gay characters’? Photograph: Jerry Robinson/AP

As comic book rivals go to battle over gay superhero plots, it’s Batman’s sexual orientation that has tabloids in a spin.

  By David Barnett

Gay is apparently the new black for comics superheroes as rival publishers Marvel and DC duke it out over who’s got the best pink credentials.

First off this week, the Daily Mail got its knickers – worn outside of its trousers, presumably – in a twist over the possibility that one of the superheroes in the DC universe inhabited by Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman is going to be unveiled as gay.

Then, yesterday, Marvel shipped editions of its Astonishing X-Men #50 a day early to comic shops so fans could read about Northstar – mainstream comics’ first openly gay character – asking his partner to marry him.

But it’s the two-fisted heroes of DC who have the Mail in a kerfuffle, and the paper even goes as far as to point the finger (without a shred of evidence) at the Dark Knight himself – possibly DC’s most masculine character, ever. While it’s – rightfully – unlikely that any jury these days would accept accusations of homosexuality as defamatory (as they did in the case of Jason Donovan v The Face magazine in 1992), by the same token the goddamn Batman has spare vials of testosterone in his utility belt, just in case his outrageously high levels dip, right next to the shark repellent (not really).

“Is Batman gay?” shrieks the Mail, deftly ignoring the more mature-audience-targeted versions of the character that have graced movie screens and comic books in recent years, in favour of illustrating the story with a shot from the kids’ cartoon Justice League. Who knows? Not the Mail, which says only that DC co-publisher Dan DiDio revealed at the weekend’s London comic convention, Kapow, that “an existing character – who was previously assumed to be straight – will become ‘one of our most prominent gay characters’.”

But the Bat-family has form for this sort of thing, the Mail – almost sadly – acknowledges in its closing paragraph: “Batwoman, a DC favourite, made her comic book comeback as a lesbian in 2006.”

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Researcher Suggests Ratings System for YA Books

By Maryann Yin

Should there be a ratings system for young adult books?

Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne studied the 40 YA books that topped the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2008, identifying 1,500 “profane words” in the books.

She explained her thoughts at U.S. News: “I think we put books on a pedestal compared to other forms of media … I thought long and hard about whether to do the study in the first place—I think banning books is a terrible idea, but a content warning on the back I think would empower parents.”

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That Book Place

By Scott McLemee

“Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital,” George Orwell wrote in an early essay,  “any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop.… [Y]ou start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books.” It is “a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point.”

The work had its downsides, and Orwell’s candor made his assessment that much more credible. You should be prepared to accept extremely long hours, for example, and to deal with customers who are garrulous or insane or both. Worst of all, to work in a bookstore meant risking a distinct kind of burnout: “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books [become] boring and even slightly sickening.” But the entrepreneur who carves out a suitable niche will at least be immune to monopolistic forces: “The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.”

Good advice — for 1936, anyway. Today, any educated person hoping to earn a small secure living (or a tiny, insecure one, for that matter)  would do better to try almost anything else. Or so I took as a given until a couple of weeks ago, when Tony Sanfilippo, the marketing and sales director for Penn State University Press, sketched out his conceptual blueprint for an offline bookstore of the not-too-distant future. (“Offline bookstore” seems like the very 2010s sort of expression.) I don’t know if his plan will turn the tide, but it certainly deserves more consideration than it’s received so far.

Writing at The Digital Digest, one of the Association of American University Presses’s blogs, Sanfilippo proposed a new model for bookselling that recognizes how much many of us miss the opportunity to browse and loiter somewhere in three dimensional space. Rather than fighting the trends that have undermined bookstores, he incorporates them into his design.  And the product — oddly enough – contains lost elements of 18th- and 19th-century book culture.

 

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Virgin Books acquires Mailer’s Marilyn

|By Charlotte Williams

Virgin Books has acquired rights in Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn, making it available for the first time as a mass-market paperback.

Virgin Books editorial director Kate Moore bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, but including e-book and serial, to the biography from Charles Buchan of the Wylie Agency on behalf of the Mailer Estate for an undisclosed sum.

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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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Are Books Becoming Too Long to Read?

Yagi Studio / Getty Images

Are writers including every nugget of research done on Google, and are publishers churning out these humongous volumes in order to justify their existence and bulk up e-book prices? Marc Wortman asks.

We read books by the word. But lately publishers seem to sell them by the pound. For a book to win recognition as BIG these days, it must be weighty. Quite literally. Is it time for publishing to go on a diet?

“Art is long, life is short,” so goes an ancient aphorism. Of late it seems to mean a lifetime isn’t long enough to read a good book.

Here’s a list of a few recent books I’d love to read—but probably won’t have time to: Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (630 pages); Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (976); Steve Coll’s investigation of ExxonMobil, Private Empire (685); Robert Caro’s fourth volume in his life of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power (736); John Lewis Gaddis’s Pulitzer-winning biography, George F. Kennan (800); Pulitzer history-award-winner Manning Marable’s Malcolm X (608); and, finally, Daniel Yergin’s The Quest (804), sequel to his Pulitzer-winning The Prize, a history of the energy industry and its role in global conflicts.

That’s a total of 5,239 pages. If you need to catch up, like I do, by reading Caro’s first three installments and Yergin’s earlier oil history, add 3,712 more. Now we’ve got 8,951 pages. Let’s subtract 15 percent for footnotes, bibliography, index, acknowledgments, and other publishing apparatus (though I enjoy looking through them). You’re left with 7,608 pages of reading. At a brisk two minutes a page, that’s about 250 hours of reading. Or, put another way, I’d have to spend four concentrated, unbroken hours reading these books each day, day after day, and in a little more than 60 days I’d have finished 11 books. Eleven.

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The Sad Cafe of Carson McCullers

		Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967) On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, and the critics used the occasion to confirm McCullers as one of America’s most important contemporary writers, one who gave her regional settings and characters “their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy.”

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