Iowa

The 35th annual L.A. Times Book Prizes are announced today. There are five finalists in 10 categories, and two prize winners were revealed: The Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement will be presented to author T.C. Boyle, and LeVar Burton will be honored with the Innovators Award for inspiring generations of readers with Reading Rainbow. The awards will be presented Saturday, April 18, in conjunction with the L.A. Times Festival of Books April 18-19.

The UNESCO Cities of Literature list has one or two rather curious inclusions, even though its criteria are focused on the strengths of current programs to support writers and literature, rather than deep world-historical literary and cultural significance. Dublin deserves to be on that list, certainly, and Edinburgh; but Melbourne comes as a little more [...]

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Banned and challenged books get a lot of press during Banned Books Week, but I think it's important to discuss issues like censorship year round and not just for one week at the end of September.

Since most challenges involve material read in schools or marketed to young adults and librarians who serve teen patrons are often at the center of these issues, I thought an overview of books that were challenged in 2013 would be of interest to Hub readers. Of course, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list,

With mommy porn bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey whipping up a sadomasochistic storm in the female book market this summer, it might seem safe to assume that old-fashioned romance novels, in which the protagonists prefer hastily confessed feelings and innocent first kisses to heavy petting and handcuffs, would begin to disappear from the shelves. After all, now that someone is finally writing erotica for the estrogen set, who needs tender love stories?

The Amish, that’s who.

I wonder how long before we stop reading these types of stories, either because it has become so established a route to publishing success that it’s not worthy of comment or because no author would be crazy enough to do the deal? I suspect publishers will just have to keep paring back their at operations’ [...]

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