In a major upset, neither Cormac McCarthy nor Lawrence Wright won a James Beard award for THE ROAD or THE LOOMING TOWER, respectively, although to be fair to those exceedingly well-decorated authors, it might have had something to do with the fact that the James Beard awards honor chefs and cookbooks.
There is some actual big-time publishing news in This Week in Publishing – earlier in the year Perseus purchased the Avalon Publishing Group, and now word has come down that Perseus is closing down the Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth imprints. Perseus will incorporate some of Avalon’s staff in its Park Avenue headquarters, and will close Avalon’s offices. The Publisher’s Weekly article is here.
In related news, former Avalon head and PGW founder Charlie Winton will be spinning off the Counterpoint imprint from Perseus and will start a new publishing venture called Counterpoint LLC.
And finally, I would be remiss if I did not send you over to this post courtsey of Sean Lindsay over at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. Reason #14: Youre Spelling is Atrowshous.
Have a great weekend!
Kim Stagliano says
Well, there goes my 5:00 beer, spewing all over the keyboard. Too damn funny. The Road did not get a James Beard award… What’s that? It’s not quite 5:00 yet?
And, Nathan, I met the most amazing writer this week! John Robison! Very cool. I blogged it of course. Too interesting not to.
James Beard award……
sex scenes at starbucks says
Is it a statement on us as writers that we had a good long laugh over The Road the other day?
Nothing bitter, really, but the intermittemt punctuation amused and confounded us (maybe it was destroyed in the Apocolyptic Event?)
Anonymous says
(this is fourth paragraph of 101 reasons to quit writing. I’m sorry but no program will ever fix this.)
I don’t think it’s much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say “sure Mister President, I’ll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them”. It’s far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than “the President says it’s cool” if you don’t teach them to think for themselves in the first place.