News from the literary world
Ronan Browne brings us the latest news from the literary world
He said he had only got the first sentence of his next book written, but word has it that John Banville was popping champagne last week to mark the finishing of his fifteenth novel. Celebrations will no doubt be put on hold after Banville's The Sea won an allegedly close Man Booker contest at a sedate and devoutly high brow ceremony held in London on Monday night.
One would imagine publishing plans for the new book will be similarly delayed to allow The Sea enjoy the anticipated fillip this high profile win will give the book. Favourites like Arthur and George and Never Let Me Go were vanquished by a worthy Irish winner that follows a widower retracing a childhood holiday on the Irish coast.
Banville had tasted loss before when his most famous work, The Book of Evidence, was beaten by Ishiguro's The Remains of The Day in 1989. This year, revenge was attained as the judges tied between the Banville and Ishiguro books with Chairman John Sutherland's intervention needed to send the prize to Sandymount. Now he can reap the rewards of winning the most coveted single book prize on this side of the Atlantic. Banville was gracious in victory, describing The Sea as 'a work of art' in a dignified manner that showed little sign of his self-admitted drunkenness at the 1989 awards. The Sea is the first Irish winner of the prize since Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
It's been pretty hard to avoid New York rapper 50 Cent this summer, a protegé of Eminem and another one of those icons of African-American culture who uses unflagging self-belief to fuel world-dominating, market-saturating careers in music, film, fashion, Tupperware ad nauseum. Sadly, there appears to be very little to Mr Cent bar one great song and having been shot nine times while a teenage drug dealer. This nugget is a mandatory offering in every interview; and indeed every time 'Fiddy' opens his mouth like a string-pull toy. This month sees the publication of his autobiography From Pieces to Weight: Once upon a Time in Southside Queens. As the Guardian once said of All Saints, he presumably released the book so that deaf people could hate him too. In a Beckham-esque interview to promote the 'auto'biograpy with Hiphop magazine, he happily credited the two men who wrote the book for him.
Also cashing in on a less bloody but equally criminal past is Martha Stewart, mother of America and inventor of apple pie. Fresh from lock-up via an airbrushed redemptive cover feature in Vanity Fair, Stewart has used her time in prison to write Martha's Rules, a book of business advice which she hopes will help people turn their passions into successful enterprise. The irony seems lost on Martha, who has taken the hardest step on the road to salvation by forgiving herself before giving us a chance to do the same. Perhaps more tempting to those interested in biogs will be the paperback publication of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, a book that comes drenched in praise – Quill nominations for the US book of the year; a Martin Scorcese documentary and a pretty famous soundtrack. And this is only volume one.
We're not sure what the collective noun for writers is... A shelf? Either way, over 8,000 of them, under the guise of the US Writers Guild, have launched a class action suit against internet company Google. The Guild claims that the company's intention to make their work available through searches on Google – to be known in perpetuity as Google's Print Library – is a gross copyright infringement. Readers will remember Google's plans to scan several major libraries including Oxford and Harvard. The digitising of several million texts is a process which will take at least a decade, a time span which should allow the behemoth company ample time to deal with the litigation. The sheer inevitability of the action and the seeming equity in the writers' cause would suggest that Google has something up its digital sleeve. The case, destined to hugely influence what we read and how much it costs, could make Google the iPod of books for the next decade.
You can hear the book companies hollering – the book club that launched a million sales is back. Oprah Winfrey, whose recommendation had an incredible 300,000 people reading William Faulkner this summer, has gone back on previous announcements and said that she will once again focus on contemporary works on the book club segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Whether it was due to the petition organised by begging US writers or just because she missed her influence on book-buying Americans, Oprah welcomed back her book club devotees by interviewing James Frey, followed by a discussion of the drug and alcohol addiction he details in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. Oprah launched writers like Jonathan Franzen, Alice Walker and Anita Shreve into the literary stratosphere – one imagines that the call asking you onto the show is an "everything's changed" moment. She will be admitting all books, fiction or not, into consideration for the slot – the only condition being that the writer must appear on the show, a stipulation that surfaced after Franzen's very public rejection of her recommendation of The Corrections.