The PW Morning Report, December 23, 2008

By Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 12/23/2008 5:29:00 AM

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A daily round-up of the latest publishing news: Booker Prize Takes Madoff Hit; iPhone Book Mania; Horace Engdahl Out at Swedish Academy; American Muslims’ Catcher in the Rye; Sir Bernard Crick Dead; Baker & Taylor U.K. Insurance Pulled; Murdoch Book Sales Flaccid; Breaking Through to White Readers; and 21st Century Les Miserables

Booker Prize Takes Madoff Hit, reports New York Times
The Man Group, which sponsors the Booker, has taken a $360 million hit from Bernard Madoff, thief

Peter Matthiessen Coming to iPhones, reports AP
Random House has announced that Christopher Paolini’s Brisingr, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Peter Matthiessen’s award-winning Shadow Country will be among the dozen-plus books coming to the iPhone and to iPod Touch

Horace Engdahl to Resign From the Swedish Academy, reports New York Times
The Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, will lose one of its anti-American voices. Engdahl: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." Bon voyage, Horace!

Young American Muslims Find Their Catcher in the Rye, reports New York Times
The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight (Soft Skull Press) is about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo and has become a "liberating" voice among young American Muslims

Sir Bernard Crick, Political Theorist and Orwell Biographer, Dead at 79, reports New York Times
George Orwell: A Life was published in 1980 and widely praised for its wealth of detail and its shrewd analysis of Orwell’s politics

Baker & Taylor U.K. Insurance Pulled, reports The Bookseller
Credit insurer Euler Hermes is refusing to agree cover for any company trading with the U.S. distributor Baker & Taylor and its U.K.-based subsidiary

Murdoch Book Sales Flaccid
According to the Huffington Post, sales of Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns The News, were "disappointing," and that its publisher, Broadway Books, "was set to pull back expenditures on its publicity"

Breaking Through to White Readers
Carleen Brice has an interesting piece in the Washington Post about getting whites to read black authors and how publishers should market black writers

21st Century Les Miserables Gets the Green Light, reports Reuters
Bring on more misery! A French court disses the relatives of Victor Hugo and gives a French publisher the OK to publish sequels to the 19th century classic

Happy Holidays and A Fruitful New Year!

The PW Morning Report will return on Monday, January 5, 2009