Wednesday, August 13, 2008

All the Latest...

Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union was declared the winner of the Hugo Award for best novel. The book also won the Nebula Award for best novel, the Locus Award for best science fiction novel and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. It was also nominated for an Edgar Award. A film adaptation of the novel will be written and directed by the Cohen brothers.

The Romance Writers of America announced the winners of the 2008 RITA Awards. Dead Girls Are Easy by Terri Garey won the award for best first book. Take a look at the rest of the winners here.

The Private Eye Writers of America have announced the nominees for the 2008 Shamus Awards.

T.C. Boyle will be publishing a novel about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, told through the eyes of four women who loved him, titled The Women, due out in 2009.

Starbucks' latest book pick is the memoir The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. In the book, Cooper chronicles her coming of age in Liberia during the 1980s. Following the country's fall into civil war and her family's exile to America, Cooper also recounts her return to Liberia, decades after she fled, to find the foster sister who was left behind.

Stephenie Meyer's fourth book in her popular Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, sold an estimated 1.3 million copies on its August 2nd release date.

The publication of Sherry Jones' novel, The Jewel of Medina, a historical fiction novel detailing the origins of Islam through the eyes of the prophet Muhammad's youngest wife A'isha, has been cancelled by Random House. RH stated that they received advice from "credible and unrelated sources...that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment." An article in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, was the instigator of the book's cancellation. Apparently she was given a galley from Random House, which hoped for a comment to use on the book jacket. Spellberg, whose research on A'isha is widely cited, does not support the book, stating that it is a deliberate misinterpretation of history (although Jones' cites 29 scholarly and religious texts used in research for the novel). Spellberg refuted the accusations that she is the cause of the cancellation. RH has said that Jones is free to sell her book to other publishers and she has published the novel's prologue on the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. There is a good summary of the fiasco and links to articles from the WSJ and other news sources on Wikipedia. Hopefully she'll find another publisher-now I'm intersted in reading this!

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