Points: 0
An independent bookshop that failed to sell a single book on a rainy day this week has been inundated with customers after publishing pictures of its empty aisles on social media.
The Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire sent a melancholy tweet revealing that it had not welcomed one paying customer, probably for the first time in its 100-year history.
Points: 0
John le Carré has been named the latest recipient of the $100,000 (£76,000) Olof Palme prize, an award given for an "outstanding achievement" in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish prime minister.
Points: 0
Smashwords' Mark Coker is sounding the alarm about indie publishers (those who write and publish their own works-let's get the terminology right-it's INDIE publishers, not the deprecating "self-published") relying too much on Amazon.
I agree with Coker.
Points: 0
In early 2018, I was spending a warm West Hollywood Sunday evening on the balcony of a young director of film development, drinking a beer and hoping for an early night[1]. I had planned to sleep on his couch, but when I suggested we turn in, he said, "Nah, just take my bed, I'm probably not sleeping tonight." I asked why not, and he looked momentarily surprised, as though it was strange I wasn't aware of the impending event that had a small but important segment of the film and publishing industries alive with anticipation at the two ends of the great book-to-film pipeline connecting agents, assistants, film execs, and book scouts through endless emails and group chats. "That new David Grann story drops at midnight," he said.
Points: 0
"Since I was 19 I've been living in England and thinking I'd go home, but there was a point, around six years go, when I realised I'm here now: I'm black British." So says Roger Robinson, who this week won the TS Eliot prize for A Portable Paradise, a poetry collection born of this realisation.
Furious laments for the victims of Grenfell Tower are followed by a crisp snapshot of idealistic young Jamaicans disembarking from the Empire Windrush in 1948, and a didactic sequence about the legacy of slavery today. A moody evocation of riot brewing on the south London streets sits alongside a love song to the National Health Service, which saved the life of his own prematurely born son.