“A poetry collection edited by Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey will be published in November, and will contain contributions from Russell Brand, Maxine Peake and Michael Rosen.
Poetry for the Many will feature the favourite poems of the former Labour leader and the trade unionist, along with their commentary. The pair’s picks range from Shakespeare, William Blake and Maya Angelou to the Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz.”
Read the full article here.
Michael Coffey, author and former editorial director of Publishers Weekly, is joining the OR Books board of directors.
Read the full article here.
Melville House has announced the longlist of finalists for the first Independent Booksellers Choice Awards.
The list of 30 semi-finalists was supposed to have been announced Friday.
“We had a last minute rush of votes and it got pretty exciting,” explained Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson. “It was so close that we wound up extending the list to 36 titles from 29 different independent presses.” Johnson said votes came in from many of the country’s most prestigious bookstores, including St. Marks Book Shop and Word in New York, 57th Street Books in Chicago, City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and Book Soup and Skylight Books in Los Angeles.
Among the finalists were titles from indie standard-bearers such as Akashic, Dalkey Archives, New Directions, Graywolf and Seven Stories, new houses such as O/R Books, micro-presses Two Dollar Radio, Flatmancrooked and The Dorothy Project, and giant indies such as Grove Atlantic and Norton.
Read more in Moby Lives
“I think that we recognize that we’re way past the moment of panic,” said the novelist DW Gibson yesterday. “And it now sort of feels like a land of opportunity.”
Mr. Gibson was explaining why he and four of his friends— Choire Sicha of the Awl and fellow novelists Dale Peck, Lisa Dierbeck, and Joshua Furst— have decided to get into the book business.
“We’re a publishing collective,” Mr. Gibson said. “The motivation is to reinstall a notion of editorial process that’s all but vanished from the traditional corporate structure of publishing that’s out there now.”
(Read more in the New York Observer)
News of my death has been greatly exaggerated (and captured, fed, and hyper-linked). I’m talking here about the new author in the era of new media, but too, about literary agents, editors, publishers, readers, librarians — People of the Book. Every day the headlines trumpet our demise. Every day another shovel of dirt hits the crowns of our caskets, and so on. I’m here to say, don’t believe it.
Read more on Huffington Post.
