from Friday’s Shelf AWareness:

“With the number of literary awards and bookish bonanzas growing every day, the introduction of a little action into the proceedings seems like a good bet for increased publicity,” noted the Guardian in an article about the £10,000 (US$19,800) Desmond Elliott prize shortlist. “Indeed, when it comes to the promotion of literary awards these days, if William Hill haven’t opened a book on it, the chances are the PR department isn’t doing its job properly.”

Touting bookmakers’ as well as books is a worrisome trend for some: “More than any of the literary qualities of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, the press release announcing the shortlist trumpets the fact that William Hill has quoted the book at 1/2 odds.”

The Guardian also ran a more traditional announcement of the shortlist, though it was headlined “Tom Rob Smith hot favourite for Desmond Elliot prize.” For the record, the finalists also include Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted (2/1) and John Walsh’s Sunday at the Cross Bones (3/1). The winner will be announced on June 26.

apparently, Doris Lessing has had it up to here with the photogs and wishes she’d never won the Nobel Prize for literature, calling it a “bloody disaster.”

Winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and announced last night, are:

• Best Novel: Down River by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
• Best First Novel by an American Author: In the Woods by Tana French (Viking)
• Best Paperback Original: Queenpin by Megan Abbott (S&S)
• Best Fact Crime: Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)
• Best Critical/Biographical: Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin Press)
• Best Short Story: “The Golden Gopher” in Los Angeles Noir by Susan Straight (Akashic Books)
• Best Juvenile: The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion Books for Young Readers)
• Best Young Adult: Rat Life by Tedd Arnold (Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin)
• Best Play: Panic by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
• Best TV Episode Teleplay: “Pilot” for Burn Notice, teleplay by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)
• Best Motion Picture Screenplay: Michael Clayton, screenplay by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• Robert L. Fish Memorial Award: “The Catch,” in Still Waters by Mark Ammons (Level Best Books)

over the week-end, the 2007 Nebula Awards were handed out:

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress

Novelette: The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang

Short Story: Always by Karen Joy Fowler

Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Other presentations included:

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

the Washington Post interviewed 3 of the writers in the King family about their various writing ventures in “The Kings of Fiction.”  the best part?  King disses Patterson

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs won this year’s oddest book title award. Reuters reported that the winner of the Bookseller’s 30th annual competition “took an impressive one-third of the 8,500 votes cast online.” I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen finished a distant second.

from today’s Shelf Awareness

Book Sense

The winners of the 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, honoring the titles ABA members most enjoyed handselling, are:

• Fiction: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead/Penguin)
• Nonfiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins)
• Children’s Literature: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
• Children’s Illustrated: Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children)

The awards will be presented at ABA’s annual Celebration of Bookselling on Thursday, May 29, at Hotel ABA (the Renaissance Hollywood) during BookExpo America. For the honor titles, click here.

“Am I happy about this year’s winner? Not at all. Do I support the committee’s decision? Unequivocally. In the end, as valid as one feels one’s reasons might be, we can’t tamper with freedom of expression as represented in the Library Bill of Rights and the Code of Ethics.”

Brian Kenney Editor in Chief: School Library Journal

If you like I were a bit uncomfortable  with the naming Orson Scott Card as the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards award Brian Kenney’s editorial hits the nail squarely on the head as he eloquently describes the tension between self-censorship and the defense of intellectual freedom.

For more information: Controversial Author Wins Edwards Award.

from The New York Times:

February 25, 2008

Arts, Briefly

Book Title Search Yields Weird Works

Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

The polls are open in the annual balloting for the Diagram Prize, honoring the world’s oddest book title, Agence France-Presse reported. Conducted by The Bookseller, a British trade magazine, the vote at www.thebookseller.com asks participants to choose from six mostly nonfiction titles on the shortlist, culled from titles submitted by publishers, bookstore workers and librarians around the world. The nominees are “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” by Jasper McCutcheon; “How to Write a How to Write Book” by Brian Paddock; “Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues” by Catharine A. MacKinnon; “Cheese Problems Solved” edited by P. L. H. McSweeney; “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs” by Big Boom; and “People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Doctor Feelgood” by Dee Gordon. The winner is to be announced on March 28. The prize has been offered since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”

 *thanks to David at CAM for passing this one along

from shelf awareness:

The winners of the 15th annual Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards are:

Nonfiction

• Winner: Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup (Little, Brown)
• Second place honors: Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet (FSG)
• Third place honors: The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov (Doubleday)

Fiction

• Winner: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
• Second place honors: The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (Milkweed Editions)
• Third place honors: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (Ecco)

The main winners each receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising. Second place winners receive $5,000. Third place winner receive $2,500. The winners read last night at the Lincoln Triangle B&N in New York City.

B&N called Here If You Need Me “a heartbreaking memoir. As a young widow with four children, Braestrup recounts her decision to pursue her deceased husband’s quest to work as a chaplain for the Maine warden service and delivers stories from the field, full of compassion, honesty, and wisdom.”

B&N described Then We Came to the End as “the tale of a group of malcontented employees at a declining Chicago ad agency,” and fiction jurist John Burnham Schwartz called it “a blisteringly funny first novel that speaks in a rollicking chorus of complaint and misdirection from within the vast corporate beehive, nailing the species, while never ceasing to recognize the human and particular.”