via American Library Association announces 2012 Youth Media Award winners | American Libraries Magazine.

Last week saw the announcements of nominations for two big sets of literary prizes.

Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction in the following categories: best novel, best first novel by an American author, best paperback original, best fact crime, best critical/biographical, best short story, best juvenile, best young adult, and the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Winners will be announced at a banquet in New York on April 26.

The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its book awards for the publishing year 2011 in the following categories: fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry.

Winners will be announced on March 8 in New York.

Goodreads in the News

Goodreads, a social networking site for readers and authors, has gotten a lot of press recently. Full disclosure: I use Goodreads, as you can see from the sidebar, although I have no personal stake in it. I enjoy seeing what other people are reading, and it’s a good place to keep track of my own books read. But while I like to see how my friends react to certain books, I very seldom read reviews by people I don’t know.

So I was intrigued recently when I saw a reference on Twitter to Anne Riley’s blog entry Breaking Up with Goodreads. It turns out that Riley is an author. She offers these reasons for deleting her Goodreads account:

The first two reasons are simple: childish behavior on the parts of both authors and reviewers (I’m sure you’ve all seen the Goodreads drama that has unfolded on two separate occasions within the past month, so I’ll refrain from posting links) and ineffectiveness as a marketing tool for myself as a writer.

But this is what really sealed the deal for me: Goodreads always made me feel pressured to leave favorable reviews–no matter how I actually felt about the book.

Riley explains in detail how uncomfortable she felt whenever fellow authors asked her to review their books: To avoid damaging her relationship with an author, she felt pressured to leave a favorable review, no matter what she actually thought of the book. Then those favorable reviews often caused Riley’s friends to ask her how she could have recommended such a bad book.

Once I read Riley’s explanation, I could certainly understand her situation. And it’s a situation that I, as just a reader, had not thought of. But while I was glad to see the case from an author’s perspective, I’m going to continue to use Goodreads myself, as I always have. I’m not an author, and I’m therefore just not in the same situation as Riley, although I can understand why she dumped Goodreads.

In other news, a flame war erupted on Goodreads between readers, authors, and agents, as Julie Bertagna explains in the U. K. Guardian‘s book blog entry YA novel readers clash with publishing establishment:

A literary punch-up that had been brewing for a while finally erupted between a bunch of readers, authors and agents on Goodreads – the vast online site where millions of members discuss the world’s books. In the same week that award-winning children’s writer Anthony McGowan caused a stir with his “scorching” Guardian review of Blood Red Road by Costa winner Moira Young, the Goodreads flame war flared across Twitter, sparked by writers and agents who seemed to be stamping on negative reviews.

It all started with a “snarky” (or “honest”, depending on who’s side you’re on) review of a much-hyped YA novel, Tempest by Julie Cross, just published in the UK by Macmillan Children’s Books (read an extract here). A sarcastic response and put-downs of reader views on the Goodreads site by Cross’s author friends, and comments by her agent, caused outrage. While Cross responded gracefully, other YA authors and agents took the fight to Twitter in a spectacularly misjudged bout of reader-bashing. . . .

This kind of thing has been going on as long as the internet has been around. And before that, we had verbal sparring in print about written literary criticism.

As any writer will tell you, along with learning the craft an author must develop a thick skin. Bertagna puts it well in her conclusion:

The hardest thing a writer has to learn is that once you publish a book, it’s no longer truly yours – even though it’s got your name on the front and it lives inside you. It belongs to the readers now. All you can do is steel yourself as you push it out into the world, stay gracious, and get busy with the next one.

Here’s a wonderful way to promote reading:

We need 50,000 book-loving volunteers to fan out across America on April 23, 2012! Just take 20 free copies of a book to a location in your community, and you just might change someone’s life.

The goal is to give books to new readers, to encourage reading, to share your passion for a great book. The entire publishing, bookstore, library, author, printing, and paper community is behind this effort with donated services and time. And with a million free World Book Night paperbacks!

The first World Book Night was held last year in the United Kingdom and was such a success that this year it’s spreading to other countries. At this site you can find out all about the event and sign up to be a book giver in the United States this April.

10 self-published novelists who made it big in 2011

As any author can tell you, getting a novel published through traditional means is hard enough – but self-publishing and then working to build up buzz for big sales by yourself is even tougher. But here are 10 novelists who struck it big last year, pushing their self-published e-books all the way to The New York Times bestseller list.

This is another of those one-item-per-page lists from The Christian Science Monitor.

Your Guide to the Man Asian Literary Prize Shortlist

The Millions offers a guide, with links to reviews, of the seven works on the short list for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize.

Charles Dickens bicentennial, and his link to Poe

A glass case in the Free Library of Philadelphia, PA, USA, holds the stuffed remains of Grip, Charles Dickens’s pet raven:

Strange as it might sound, the dead bird and accompanying year-long Dickens program at the Free Library probably provide the perfect means for the American culture vulture to celebrate not only Dickens’s 200th birthday on Feb. 7, but also the little-known yet astonishing impact of Grip on American letters and popular culture to this day.

Read how Dickens’s bird entered literary history as the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven.

Genre in the Mainstream: 5 Literary/SF “Crossover” Books to Watch For in 2012

More recommendations to guide your reading choices for the new year:

• The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (Random House)
• Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot (Grove Press/Black Cat)
• Dust Girl by Sarah Zettel (Random House YA)
• The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker  (Random House)
• Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret (FSG)

Here are two more “best books” lists I think I’ve missed, NPR’s choices of The Best Music Books of 2011 and 2011′s Best American Poetry.

Britain’s The Telegraph provides comprehensive coverage in The Literary Year 2011. If you weren’t able to keep up with all the controversy over literary awards this year, you can beef up your knowledge here. This article also summarizes major publications in various fields (such as memoir, biography, politics, and sports) and concludes: “If it was a listless year for fiction, the non-fiction market fared little better.” PBS Newshour offers Conversation: The Year in Fiction, a discussion with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

Book lovers are also word lovers. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, offer 2011: The Year in Words, a compendium of “Defining Moments: In politics, culture, sports and more, these words spiked in lookups because of events in the news.”

The Christian Science Monitor challenges your knowledge of the year’s highly touted publications with 2011 fiction quiz: Can you recognize the opening line? [Warning: Each individual item is on a separate page, so click at your own risk.]

I’ll be creating my own list of best books read in 2011 and posting it separately. If you have a similar list of your own, you can include a link to it in the comments section.

Finally, if you’d rather focus on the year ahead than on the year past, Christian Science Monitor contributor Rachel Meier has this list of 6 books you should resolve to read in 2012 (one recommendation per page, annoyingly).

David Guterson beat out “stiff competition” (his award-accepting spokesperson’s pun, not mine) Tuesday night to win the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Ed King, a modern Seattle-set reworking of the Oedipus myth. The prize, now in its 19th year, was founded by the Literary Review’s then-editor Auberon Waugh (the novelist Evelyn’s son) to “discourage” the “crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel,” sex scenes that were included, he argued, purely to boost sales figures.

The 62nd National Book Awards were held at Cipriani’s on Wall Street on Wednesday night, with the awards going to Thanhha Lai for Inside Out & Back Again (Young People’s Literature), Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (Poetry), Stephen Greenblatt for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Nonfiction), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Fiction).

via National Book Awards Go to Lai, Finney, Greenblatt, and Ward.

The novelist Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “The Sense of an Ending,” a slim and meditative story of mortality, frustration and regret.

“The Sense of an Ending,” published in the United States by Knopf, part of Random House, is Mr. Barnes’s 11th novel, a 163-page book that has sometimes been called a novella for its size and simplicity.

This story is all over Twitter this morning. Here’s just one newspaper’s account of why this mess occurred. Apparently, the National Book Foundation doesn’t like the subject matter of Lauren Myracle’s novel Shine, which deals with a hate crime. In requesting the withdrawal of the book, the National Book Foundation has agreed to make a $5000 donation to the Matthew Shepard Foundation in the author’s name.

You can do the math.

And the winners are:

• The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu (selected by Nicole Krauss)
• Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans (selected by Robert Stone)
• The Walking People by Mary Beth Keane (selected by Julia Glass)
• Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories by Melinda Moustakis (selected by Jaimy Gordon)
• Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley (selected by Oscar Hijuelos)

Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet whose sometimes bleak but powerful work explores themes of nature, isolation and identity, won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.