Publishing Company Blog: July 2023

Monday, July 31, 2023

Short story collection by Pedro Almodóvar to be published next year

An English translation of 12 stories, which the Spanish film director calls his ‘fragmentary autobiography’, will come out next September

Authors join online campaign to save ‘vital’ Devon mobile library services

Stephen Fry and Michael Rosen say that councillors’ choice to discontinue the vans would restrict people’s access to books and amounts to an ‘act of cruelty’

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Judge blocks Arkansas law allowing librarians to be charged over ‘harmful’ books

Decision comes as lawmakers in conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books

Saturday, July 29, 2023

Paris booksellers angry at plans to ‘hide’ their stalls during Olympics

About 60% of bouquinistes along the Seine River will be moved on during the Games next year for security reasons

Friday, July 28, 2023

Arthur children’s book faces potential Florida ban over claim it ‘damaged souls’

School district member files challenge to Arthur’s Birthday, 1989 book by Marc Brown, which is among 45 titles pending review

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Tucker Carlson says ‘being racist is not a crime’ but if he was he would ‘just say so’

Former Fox News host, who has long been accused of pushing racist invective on his show, denies being racist in biography

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Tucker Carlson claims Fox News firing was condition of $787.5m settlement

Former prime-time host says in new book he ‘knows’ his firing was part of deal to resolve Dominion Voting Systems defamation case

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Venice film festival picks starry films despite actors’ strike

Hollywood films vying for Golden Lion include Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, with non-competition films by Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater

Shankari Chandran wins 2023 Miles Franklin award for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

Set around a culture war in a nursing home, Chandran’s third novel has won Australia’s biggest literary prize – and yet, she says, she was almost too afraid to write it

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Saturday, July 22, 2023

Man charged for alleged harassment of Yumi Stynes, who has received threats over sex education book

The 23-year-old was arrested at Balmain police station and charged with one count of use carriage service to menace, harass or offend

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Friday, July 21, 2023

Oppenheimer biographer supports US bill to bar use of AI in nuclear launches

Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, says technology is ‘too dangerous to gamble with’ and supports senator’s attempt to bar it

Australian classification board rejects calls to restrict graphic novel Gender Queer

Board finds memoir by non-binary writer Maia Kobabe ‘appropriate for its intended audience’ following an appeal

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Authors call for AI companies to stop using their work without consent

Margaret Atwood, Viet Thanh Nguyen and 8,000 others have signed an open letter asking that permission is obtained and compensation given when a writer’s work is used by AI

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Roald Dahl museum acknowledges author’s antisemitism

Museum has condemned ‘all racism directed at any group or individual’ in statement about the writer

Big W removes sex education book from shelves after staff members abused

Publisher of Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes defends book after conservative campaigners claim it is ‘teaching sex to children’

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

John Betjeman dismissed as ‘songster of tennis lawns’ in 1967 search for poet laureate

Records from the National Archive reveal the cut-throat world of British poetry, and the politics behind selecting candidates

Tributes pour in after Spanish cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez Talavera dies aged 87

The wildly popular author of the Mortadelo and Filemón books, which started life in 1958 and went on to entertain millions of children, continued working until soon before his death

Monday, July 17, 2023

Obama speaks out against ‘profoundly misguided’ book bans in school libraries

Former president writes open letter to American librarians and appears in TikTok video decrying rightwing censorship push

Sunday, July 16, 2023

‘The real deal’: young UK graphic artist nominated for five ‘comic book Oscars’

Unflinchingly depicting her battles with depression, Zoe Thorogood, a 24-year-old from Bradford, has scooped most nominations for this week’s Eisner Awards

French film-maker’s family fight to keep link to chateau that inspired his stories

Marcel Pagnol based his famous movies on a Provencal manor he’d known as a child. Now his legacy is at risk, says his grandson

Friday, July 14, 2023

‘Heart-stopping’: censored pages of history of Elizabeth I reappear after 400 years

British Library uses new technique to uncover passages of Camden’s Annals, the first official account of Elizabeth’s reign

Thursday, July 13, 2023

Hungarian bookstore fined for selling LGBTQ+ novel in youth section

Heartstopper by Alice Oseman was on shelves for young people and did not have closed packaging as required by controversial law

British Library acquires ultra-rare cricket book thanks to anonymous donor

William Epps’s 1799 book of scorecards from ‘the grand matches’, formerly owned by commentator John Arlott, has been saved for the nation

Waterstones debut fiction prize 2023 shortlist announced

Novels include tales of future gladiators and Vietnamese refugees, a Great War love story, a mystery thriller, and stories of generational trauma and the Troubles

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Royal Society of Literature aims to broaden representation as it announces 62 new fellows

RSL president Bernadine Evaristo highlights need to change to become an organisation for all writers rather than just the white and middle class

Salman Rushdie on stabbing attack: ‘I have crazy dreams’

Writer speaks to the BBC about his physical and mental health as well as his thoughts on his attempted murderer

Hungarian bookseller wraps LGBTQ+ books in plastic to stop people reading them

Libri bows to pressure to comply with ‘child protection’ law after takeover by foundation linked to PM

First edition of The Hobbit found in Dundee charity shop sells for £10,000

The book, which is one of the first 1,500 copies printed in 1937 and contains illustrations by JRR Tolkien, was discovered in the backroom at a Cancer Research UK store

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94

The Czech novelist found himself silenced by the communist regime at home, but achieved international fame with playfully philosophical fiction

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Wonka: first trailer for Timothée Chalamet’s chocolatey prequel

Oscar nominee stars as a young version of Roald Dahl’s sweet mogul with Hugh Grant playing an Oompa Loompa

Britney Spearss brave tell-all memoir out in October

The Woman in Me, which will cover pop star’s conservatorship experience among other topics, is set for release later this year

Dürer painted himself at centre of Renaissance altarpiece in revenge research finds

Exclusive: Cambridge academic’s study of surviving letters shows pay row with wealthy patron

Life imitates art as El Salvador pressures book fair to bar dissenting writer

Barbers on Strike, author Michelle Recinos’s collection of short stories, has apparently upset strongman president Nayib Bukele

Monday, July 10, 2023

Charlie Watts book collection to be sold at Christies

Rare books owned by the Rolling Stones drummer – including first editions of The Great Gatsby and The Hound of the Baskervilles – will be auctioned this autumn

Publisher withdraws former police officers memoir after force questions Port Arthur massacre claim

Victoria Police says Christophe Glasl was not in Tasmania at the time of Port Arthur massacre, despite his claim to have been involved in its resolution

Geoffrey Chaucer note asking for time off work identified as his handwriting

Exclusive: Document was originally thought to be written by clerk on behalf of Canterbury Tales writer who worked as civil servant

Sunday, July 9, 2023

Its not climate change its everything change: sci-fi authors take on the global crisis

Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy led the way. Now a new crop of novelists is putting the heating emergency at the forefront of their plots

Friday, July 7, 2023

YA author shoots to No 1 on Amazon bestseller list after viral TikTok video

TikToker Jerrad Swearenjin approached Shawn Warner during a book signing because he looked ‘super defeated’

Study finds English libraries generate at least 3.4bn in yearly value

Researchers hope their report will change the way local and national governments invest in community services

Thursday, July 6, 2023

Edinburgh film festival announces lineup after seeing off closure threat

Having survived the collapse of its parent organisation, the festival returns with a slimmed-down event

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Authors file a lawsuit against OpenAI for unlawfully ingesting their books

Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay allege that their books, which are copyrighted, were ‘used to train’ ChatGPT because the chatbot generated ‘very accurate summaries’ of the works

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Winners of the inaugural Martha Mills prize for young writers announced

Judges praised the ‘staggering amount of talent on display’ in entries to the competition launched by the London Review Bookshop for writers aged 11 to 14