On October 10, Kiran Desai won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic). Set in both the northeastern Himalayas and New York City, The Inheritance of Loss follows the tensions between an old anglophile judge and his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, as well! as the trials of Biju, the son of the judge’s cook, as he tries to evade U.S. immigration services.

Desai was born in India in 1971, and was educated in India, in England, and the U.S.  She studied creative writing at Columbia University and is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Anchor).

The Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland. For more details, visit booker.

The Small Press Center will be holding its Annual Benefit and Cocktail Reception, this year in honor of Alice Walker, November 17, 2006, in NYC.

Alice Walker is one of the most prolific and important writers of our times, known for her literary fiction including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple, (which was later adapted i! nto a film, and is now a major Broadway musical), her many volumes of poetry, and her powerful nonfiction collections. Her advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed has spanned the globe.

Tickets are only $75. For details and an invitation email info@smallpress.org or call 212 764-7021.

Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, and Edward Hirsch will celebrate and read from the work of Canadian-born short-story master Mavis Gallant at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006. The program is part of the Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story series. Ms. Gallant, who lives in Paris, is acclaimed for her mastery in short story writing that has influenced American writers for nearly fifty years. She has published more than 100 short stories in the New Yorker, the third-most in the magazine’s “storied” history. Gallant will make a rare New York appearance at the event. The event is co-presented by PEN and the National Book Foundation. For more information and tickets, visit www.symphonyspace.org.

If you’re an author, having your publisher insert a reading group guide into the back of your paperback is a nice way to reach out to book clubs. But for novelist John Shors, that wasn’t enough. When Shors’s novel Beneath a Marble Sky came out in paperback from New American Library in June, it carried a note from the author, offering to talk to any book club that contacted him via e-mail. Since then, Shors has met with (or teleconferenced with) a club almost every night, and hopes to talk with 1,000 clubs by next June.

Read the Publisher’s Weekly article here.

The world’s largest book chain is trying to create the world’s largest book club. Barnes & Noble has launched an interactive, online book club (at bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com), allowing readers to commingle—digitally, at least—with authors. Barnes & Noble Book Clubs, which launched this week with author Carl Hiaasen—his next book, Nature Girl, hits November 14—as one of its first featured authors available for questions and online chatter. B&N plans to host online talks with roughly 30 authors this fall and will also have discussions, hosted by bn.com online moderators, about classics and “noteworthy titles” in a variety of categories such as personal finance and health.

Marie Toulantis, CEO of bn.com, said the promotional opportunity for authors–which follows on the heels of the successful Barnes & Noble Recommends program, through which the giant retailer highlights one book a season to aggressively push in its stores–”meets the needs of authors who are eager to reach as broad an audience as possible.”

Read the Publisher’s Weekly article here.

Matthew Skelton, author of bestselling children’s book Endymion Spring, discusses his life, career and experience writing the novel.

Having his first novel plucked from an agent’s slush pile and commissioned as a movie let Matthew Skelton make the leap from a failed academic who once couch surfed across Europe to an adored author on a book tour that puts him up in posh hotels.

Yet more than creature comforts, Skelton says the success of “Endymion Spring,” a history-fueled fantasy that has been described as a “The Da Vinci Code” for children, has allowed him to escape the Ivory Tower and accept himself as a dreamer who relates best to adolescents.

“They don’t just read books — they live inside them,” Skelton, 35, says of the young readers whose enthusiasm for fiction made “Endymion Spring” a best seller the week it was published in August.

Link to the Yahoo News story.

From October 17th to December 15th, HarperTeen editors and authors invite you to join thousands of fans online to collectively create an original short story—one chapter at a time.

It’s easy to get involved. Just register by clicking on the link below, and then follow the weekly schedule to participate. You can submit chapters, vote for your favorites, or just browse and get writing tips from bestselling authors. You decide on your level of involvement. But everyone has the chance to win cool prizes—all you have to do is register!

HarperTeen is giving away incredible prizes over the course of this eight-week event. So sign up now and write, vote, and chat to win!

Prizes include:

* A $5,000 College or Higher Education Scholarship
* A trip to New York City to meet publishing executives and have lunch with a HarperTeen author
* A Princeton Review SAT Prep Course
* Thousands in shopping sprees from Alloy.com and Sephora.com
* Signed copies of books
* And more!

Link

A “gripping” exploration of the economic and business implications of China’s breakneck growth, China Shakes the World, has won the 2006 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS - news) Business Book of the Year award.

James Kynge, the book’s author, collected the £30,000 top prize at a ceremony in New York on Thursday night. The judges praised the pace and style of the book, published by Houghton Mifflin.

The other finalists were: The Long Tail, Chris Anderson’s look at the economics of the internet; Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants about US companies that decide to be great instead of big; The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman, an analysis of the world’s biggest retailer; and The Box, an investigation by Marc Levinson of the container’s impact on world trade.

Link to the Yahoo News story