Hilary Mantel has become the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize twice. Mantel was awarded the Booker on Tuesday for Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment in her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, and the sequel to her novel Wolf Hall, which won the Booker in 2009. The only other authors to win the award twice are J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey.
Despite his near-rock-star popularity outside of Japan, Haruki Murakami has delivered only one reading in his home country. He doesn't do TV or radio interviews there, and he won't appear on the cover of magazines. "In short, Murakami in Japan is a commercially successful cipher,” writes Roland Kelts.
Johnny Depp (yes, that Johnny Depp) is getting his own Harper Collins imprint dedicated to "authentic, outspoken, and visionary" books. Over the next several years, Infinitum Nihil will publish a biography of Bob Dylan and a previously unpublished novel by Woody Guthrie.
“Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you’re interested in finding on the internet. Amazon knows what you’ve bought, and has a pretty good idea of what you might want to buy next.” Guess which of the three is becoming most valuable to adverters. Wired reports on Amazon's latest big business venture.
French critics are not impressed by the watered-down sadomasochism of Fifty Shades of Gray, which has been described as "flavorless," "insignificant, consensual and cliched," and full of the "fantasies of a cheap sex-shop." Still, that hasn’t dampened optimism about the book’s commercial prospects: The book’s French publisher has ordered a first run of 500,000 copies.
