The latest edition of Publisher’s Weekly reports that Diana McWhorter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Carry Me Home in 2002, is writing a book set in her home state of Alabama. Why is this so exciting that it deserves a blog post? Because she is writing about my hometown and Werner Von Braun. Von Braun was the German scientist responsible for the V-2 rockets and our space program. He moved to Huntsville in 1950 and helped develop our ballistic missle program and our space program. Living on Redstone Arsenal, he also became Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960, where they developed the Saturn rockets. Today Marshall develops much of our space propulsion systems and also works on the International Space Station. In Huntsville, he was a big deal obviously. Huntsville is also home to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, where yours truly spent some time as a cashier in the Museum shop at the tender age of 16 (a job I loathed as any teenager forced to wear a lame-ass uniform of khaki shorts and a polo shirt might be. At least in the summer I didn’t have to wear the flight suit). So as you can see, I am very excited about this book. I am glad that a native Alabamian is writing is as well, especially a Pulitzer Prize winning one.

Do we need another set of book awards? Even if they are ‘high profile’? Reed Business Information thinks so. They are calling it the Quills and they even got NBC to agree to air the whole thing. According to Publishers Lunch, they want it to be like the Golden Globes or something. For fucksake!
There are 18 categories as well including something called Rookie of the Year, which I imagine is first time author?
Here is most of what Publishers Lunch has to say:

Nominations in most categories will come from 6,000 booksellers and librarians who subscribe to Reed-owned Publishers Weekly (drawing from a pool of books reviewed by Publishers Weekly). A committee will select nominees for the Book Club, Best Book to Film, and Design awards. Consumers will then vote, online and at retail, between August 15 and September 15.

The broadcast is characterized as a “celebrity-energized presentation in the fashion of the Golden Globes awards.” The program is being run by former Variety publisher Gerry Byrne, who underscores that “good television is based upon celebrity,” and notes their plan to tap the intersection between books and the culture at large to recruit top celebrities as presenters (and potentially nominees/attendees). A production team is likely to be named within the next month or so.

Byrne also notes the awards are meant to “complement the other literary awards-it will not usurp any of them.” In addition to being carried by the NBC-owned stations, which include 14 of the top markets, Byrne says the program will be offered to other NBC affiliate, and could “potentially could be offered to other stations outside the network.”

The awards themselves are a Reed-owned, for-profit venture, with revenue coming from sponsorships and table and event sales (and presumably some advertising in Reed’s magazines). But at least some proceeds from the event will fund the Quills Literacy Foundation, also run by Byrne, supporting new and existing literacy efforts. For the first year, Reed will “guarantee a certain amount of dollars” to the foundation.

An advisory executive council includes top publishing executives (Peter Olson, Jane Friedman, Larry Kirshbaum, Greg Josefowicz, Bob Miller, Jim Chandler, Avin Mark Domnitz, and Robert Gottlieb) alongside other “literacy-minded professionals from finance, media, entertainment, and education.”

A number of initiatives are planned, both in stores and on the NBC stations, to promote the nominated books and reading in general. Byrne notes, “The idea this year is to get it right. Once you get it right, you can do pretty much anything you want with it.”

So any opinions out there?

Small Island by Andrea Levy just won the Whitbread prize tonight (they get £25,000! That’s $47,000!). This book has already won the Orange Prize as well. Of course the novel is not yet available here in the U.S. (due in April), but maybe a few prizes will encourage Picador to hurry up the production schedule.

Posts might slow down for the next fews weeks—am swamped at work. But read this article by book rep John Eklund. He’s a book reader after my own heart. I too hate being marketed to when it comes to books. When a book hits the bestseller lists, it becomes less interesting to me as well (and I realize how dumb this is). But he has a passion for books and as long as there are still people like that out there, it can’t become completely awful can it?
Go read this post over at BookAngst. It ties into this a bit too. It’s all about how some ‘good’ books don’t sell well in the marketplace due to not enough marketing or whatever. People have gotten passionate in the comments. I feel like this is all connected. I’ve been giving the concept of ‘consumerism’ a great deal of thought lately (Beatrice pointed out this interesting article about it). Maybe there’s a longer post in here somewhere, along the lines of books, there are so many, such little time to read, market trends, etc. Unfortunately it will have to wait for a spare moment which I don’t seem to have these days.

Robert Birnbaum has an interview with Louis de Bernières over at the Morning News. Louis de Bernières is author of Birds Without Wings, Corelli’s Mandolin, and The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (my personal favorite).

Dan Wickett, who doesn’t need sleep apparently, has an interview with the editors of some fine literary journals. (One of these days I will add a section of links to lit journals to my sidebar. One of these days I tell you.) Included in the interview are the editors of Small Spiral Notebook and Land Grant College Review, both interesting journals.

Welcome to the Thunderdome! Sorry. But this is pretty cool in my opinion. The Morning News is starting a Tournament of Books. Their staff, plus Jessa Crisping of Bookslut, Maud Newton, and Mark Sarvas aka TEV will each read two books and determine the winner of the battle (at least I think that’s what’s happening). Powell’s is sponsoring it.
I kind of wish the whole thing were bigger though. More books, more judges (me for instance?). But I am eager to see the results.