Harper Lee sues agent over copyright to To Kill A Mockingbird

Author claims she was duped into signing over the rights on her prizewinning book.

By Paul Harris

Harper Lee, the reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird, has sued a literary agent, claiming that he tricked the ageing writer into assigning him copyright on the classic book.

The move marks a rare step into the spotlight for Lee, who is known for keeping a low profile for such a household name, living quietly in a tiny town in the deep south of America and eschewing almost all media requests.

However, in a shock move, 87-year-old Lee has now filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan court alleging that Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee’s long-time agent, Eugene Winick, tricked Lee into signing over the copyright on the book.

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2013 Pulitzer Prize: ‘Orphan Master’ Brings Fiction Prize Back

By Gabe Habash

Last year’s biggest Pulitzer announcement was the one that wasn’t made, as the board decided not to award a fiction winner for the first time since 1977. This year’s announcement was less controversial, as prizes were given in every category, including Fiction for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House).

Other winners were: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (History); The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (Biography); Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (Poetry); Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King (General Nonfiction).

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Life on Main Street

		Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) On this day in 1920 Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was published. This was the first of a string of hit novels over the next decade, most of which poked and scolded at the puritan terrors of small town life-conformity, boosterism, “a range of grotesque vulgarity,” says one critic, “which but for him would have left no record.” A Pulitzer (rejected) and eventually a Nobel (accepted) would follow.

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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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Why are certain books banned for prisoners?

Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative

 By Valerie Merians

In honor of Black History Month, Leonard Pitts tells a story to give readers pause in a column for the Orlando Sentinel.

According to Pitts, Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization that provides legal representation for the indigent and incarcerated, sent two books to prisoner Mark Melvin last year. Melvin is in jail for life for a murder he committed when he was 14.  The books were Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, about a doctor’s struggle to bring medical services to Haiti, and Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of “how the South instituted a form of de-facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and ‘selling’ them to plantations, turpentine farms and other places of back-breaking labor.”

Melvin was allowed to read the first book, but was denied the right to read Slavery by Another Name. Stevenson told Pitts prison officials “felt it was too provocative, they didn’t like the title, they didn’t like the idea that the title conveyed. They didn’t read the book, but they were concerned about it and thought that it would be ‘too dangerous’ to have in the prisons.”

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After a Quarter-Century, an Author Looks Back at His Holocaust Comic

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By DWIGHT GARNER

Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the most unconventional great book yet written about the Holocaust, the one that turned Nazis into cats and Jews into mice and Poles into pigs, turns 25 this year. It was the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, and it changed the way comics — the term seems wrong for “Maus” — are viewed in America. It proved they could be serious art.

“Maus” is not a graphic novel but a work of memoir and history. It tells the story of Mr. Spiegelman’s father in Poland before World War II, in Auschwitz during the war and as an old coot in Rego Park, Queens, after the fighting stopped. Part of Mr. Spiegelman’s accomplishment in “Maus” is that he turned it into a second-generation Holocaust survivor’s account, too. That is, he made himself a character in the book and threaded in his own quizzical modern sensibility. “Maus” doesn’t have a tired or sanctimonious bone in its body.

Mr. Spiegelman’s new book, “MetaMaus,” functions as a kind of artist’s scrapbook, chapbook, photo album and storage trunk. Packed with more extras than a new “Transformers” DVD, it’s a look back at “Maus” and its complicated composition and reception. His publisher calls this shaggily engaging volume, accurately enough, a “vast Maus midrash.”

An extended Q & A with Mr. Spiegelman, a kind of swollen Paris Review interview, fills most of the book’s pages, while arty and inky things pack the margins: draft sketches from “Maus”; personal photographs; family trees; official documents like his mother’s passport and his parents’ arrest records from Auschwitz.

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Jennifer Egan takes Pulitzer prize

A Visit From the Goon Squad adds prestigious fiction award to haul of honours.

By Alison Flood

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An experimental novel inspired by Proust and The Sopranos and featuring a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s widely acclaimed novel A Visit From the Goon Squad beat books by Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee to win the $10,000 (£6,000) award, the most prestigious in American writing.

 Judges called Egan’s novel “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed”. The interlocking story, which has already won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, follows the lives of ageing punk rocker and music mogul Bennie Salazar and his young PA Sasha, moving from the 1970s to the near future, from New York and San Francisco to Naples and Africa.

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Time and Tide

 Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours, returns with another psychologically penetrating novel, By Nightfall. But what he really wants to do is hit the beach.

 By Ari Karpel

 Michael Cunningham’s home in Provincetown, Mass., hews to the classic Cape Cod style. The shingles of his modest two-story condo along the water on the far east end of town are graying from the salty sea air….read more