Lunch for Friday, March 7

NBCC Award Winners
Fiction
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
 
Autobiography
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying
 
Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
 
General Nonfiction
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
 
Criticism
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
 
Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

Was Finland Bumped As FBF Guest Over Business Deal?
The Frankfurt Book Fair decided this week that the guest of honor country for 2011 will be Iceland -- "a slot the Finns had thought was theirs." The Guardian says "the decision followed growing anti-Finnish sentiment in Germany over Nokia's decision earlier this year to pull its factory out of Bochum in the Ruhr valley in favour of a move to lower-cost Romania, leading to a loss of more than 3,000 jobs."
 
Director of Finnish Literature Exchange Iris Schwanck tells the paper FBF director "Jürgen Boos admitted to me that the Bochum situation did not make the atmosphere favourable for Finland at the present time. The decision is a major disappointment." The Guardian adds Finland had reportedly lobbied for more than a decade to become the guest country and had offered to pay €12m (£9.1m) for the privilege. But FBF's Thomas Minkus tells them, "The political and sociological discussion resulting from the relocation decision by Nokia has nothing to do with our decision." 
 
In a statement just released, FBF adds: "The Frankfurt Book Fair refutes claims that the decision to invite Iceland to be Guest of Honour at the 2011 Fair was in any way influenced by a perceived anti-Finnish sentiment in Germany...
 
"Finland and Iceland each have rich literary traditions and cultures, and both countries presented particularly strong bids for 2011. It has long been the Frankfurt Book Fair’s ambition to invite a Scandinavian country to be Guest of Honour. Exploratory discussions were held in both Finland and Iceland and formal expressions of interest from both countries were received in 2007. A decision was recently made to invite Iceland to be Guest of Honour and a formal announcement will be made in the near future.
 
"The Frankfurt Book Fair very much hopes to welcome Finland as Guest of Honour in the near future and is continuing its amicable conversations with Dr Iris Schwank of the Finnish Literature Information Centre."
Guardian

The Most News that the Business Uses
Every day, we gather, report, recap and interpret the most publishing news, deal transactions, and job offers anywhere. Today's Lunch Deluxe includes these additional stories and links:
 
April Book Sense
Times Memo: No More Single-Source Profiles
Two Legal Tales: Mosley's Wife Can Sue; Case Against Hyperion/Washingtonienne Renewed
Shorts: Vonnegut's Serial; Borders UK Closes DC; Beck Worries for Brad Thor's Life

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Personnel News/Announcements
Kate Kennedy and Anne Berry have been promoted at Harmony and Shaye Areheart Books to associate editor and assistant editor, respectively. Both will continue to acquire narrative nonfiction, biography, memoir, and spirituality/self-help for Harmony Books and fiction for Shaye Areheart Books.
 
Random House and family of Norman Mailer will host A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer on Wednesday, April 9 at Carnegie Hall, at 4pm.

In the Book World, We Just Call It "Editing"
Michael Kinsley has a tongue-in-cheek piece posted by the venerable Time.com about the recent rash of "autophoniographies" which inadvertently supports a favorite point from book publishing. In our world we call them "copy editors" or "line editors" but whatever name you use, most would have easily challenged the numerous errors of fact and unsupportable exaggerations that appear in Kinsley's short column:
 
-- "In recent days, two celebrated autobiographies have been exposed as fakes."
 
Error of usage, or fact? Autobiographies are not the same as memoirs.
 
Also, what is the basis to support the word "celebrated"? Jones/Seltzer's book was on the market for four days and received a few positive reviews. That really qualifies as "celebrated"?
 

-- "In Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust, not yet published in the U.S. but already celebrated in Europe, she claims that she was adopted by a pack of wolves who protected her from the Nazis."
 
The book was published in the US in 1997 by Mt. Ivy Press, and was the focus of a Boston-area lawsuit (in 2002) and appeal (in 2005), all widely reported and easy to find with a single web search.
 
And the subtitle is incorrect: it should read "A Memoire of the Holocaust *Years*" There's this site called Amazon.com...
 

-- "... as for Defonseca, certainly there are many true stories of surviving the Holocaust that strain credulity. But adopted by wolves? Please."
 
Even in Europe, the adopted-by-wolves story was not considered credible by many, but that's not the lie that was recently disproven, as Kinsley implies, nor is it her greatest offense against readers.Defonseca was exposed earlier this year for her claims to have been Jewish (she was not) and on the run across Europe during the war to evade the Nazis (documents support her attending a Catholic school in her native Belgium in 1943-44, when she said she was on the run).
 

-- "Every book has small mistakes that go uncorrected, and these encourage bigger mistakes and outright fabrications."
 
Every book??? All 290,000 a year? And they are never corrected, even in errata or reprintings? I guess we could say the same about most magazine and newspaper articles -- read by more people than most books, and thus, if the specious, undocumented assertion of a causal link is true, even more responsible for this "encouragement."
 

-- "Then, too, there is the amazing fact that book publishers -- unlike newspaper and magazine publishers -- do virtually nothing to check or warrant the accuracy of what they print."
 
I believe my notes from above take care of this statement without further ado. See also: Newspaper story about Jones ran in New York Times.
Time

Lots of New Jobs
We added yet another 7 new jobs to our industry-leading Job Board just yesterday, now with 130 new opportunities still live in all.
 
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And for job-seekers, we present great new possibilities every day and conveniences like an RSS ping to keep you posted on every new offering. Among the latest: 

Executive Managing Editor  [Full Time]
Large Publishing House (New York, NY)
   
Senior Production Editor  [Full Time]
Simon & Schuster (New York, NY)
   
Sales Representative NYC/Mid Atlantic Territory  [Full Time]
Taschen (New York, NY)
   
Designer- Interior Text Designer/Catalog Designer  [Full Time]
Other Press LLC (New York, NY)
   
Director  [Full Time]
University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE)
   
Sales Manager, Children's Books  [Full Time]
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (New York, NY)
   
Art/Creative Director for Hyperion Books for Children  [Full Time]
Disney Publishing Worldwide (White Plains, NY)

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