LISNews: Librarian News

New York Times: The literary world still has not recovered from its Pulitzer snub last week, when the absence of an award for fiction incensed publishers, authors and booksellers.

But they may find some consolation in a new set of prizes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will announce on Thursday: the N.Y.C. Literary Honors, given to living writers whose work and lives have been informed by New York City, as a way of highlighting its place as home to the publishing industry and an inspiration to authors.

The honorees, to be named at an evening ceremony at Gracie Mansion, are closely associated with New York in their work and in their lives. They include Paul Auster for fiction, Roz Chast for humor, Walter Dean Myers for children’s literature and Robert A. Caro for nonfiction. Mr. Caro’s first book, “The Power Broker,” a biography of Robert Moses, is one of the best-known works of nonfiction ever written about the city and its history.

Way to go Mr. Mayor! Any other communities doing likewise?

Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood
As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold.

With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend. Authors who sign up will be encouraged to use social media to promote their work, and will receive $1 for every audiobook sold from Audible.com, Audible.co.uk or iTunes, on top of their royalties

You have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate. On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

[Via]

How do the bestsellers of March 1966 match up to the bestselling fiction and nonfiction books today? Newsweek compared the New York Times bestseller lists to see what people read then and what they read now, and declared a winner. Has anyone done something like this in their library?