The celebrated novelist Norman Mailer has walked into a critical maelstrom in Germany with the publication of his new novel - his first for 10 years - which depicts a young and adolescent Adolf Hitler.

The Castle in the Forest, which includes the bed-wetting young Hitler known as “Adi”, has been pummelled by newspaper critics and has angered Germany’s influential Central Council of Jews, which has urged artists to finally leave the history of the dictator alone.

Link to the rest of the article.

…according to the British Library, government-imposed spending cuts may soon put the proud traditions of a national institution at risk. Ahead of the Treasury’s 2007 spending review, library officials have drawn up a briefing paper outlining measures they would have to take if the widely speculated cuts of between 5% and 7% come to fruition.

You can read the rest of the article over here.

Boaz Publishing, a tiny literary publisher in Albany, Calif., has created a new $10,000 award for unpublished novels. The Frances Fabri Literary Prize for Fiction honors the memory of holocaust survivor Frances Fabri, an unpublished poet and fiction writer who spent much of her later years recording oral histories of fellow survivors. Boaz publisher Tom Southern said he sees the prize as an ideal way for agents to find an outlet for “those books that they believed in, but just haven’t made it into print yet.”

In addition to the cash award and hardcover publication by Boaz, the endowment for the prize includes $5,000 for marketing. Southern said that the prize is being funded by investments from anonymous donors. The funds are sufficient for Boaz to plan a second book prize—most likely also for unpublished fiction—sometime later this year.

The deadline for the first Frances Fabri Prize is February 28. The winner will be announced April 15. Submission details can be found online at www.boazpublishing.com.

Read the full Publishers Weekly article here.

After putting her book club on ice for a year after her showdown with memoirist James Frey, Oprah has stuck with autobiography for her new selection: Sidney Poitier’s spiritual autobiography The Measure of a Man, published by Harper SanFrancisco in 2000. The selection appears well timed for an Oscar season in which an unusually diverse group of actors are up for awards. Poitier was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field in 1963.

From the Publishers Weekly article; read the Yahoo! News article on the same subject here.

HELSINKI, Finland - A novel whose narrative consists entirely of mobile phone text messages has been published in Finland.

“The Last Messages” tells the story of a fictitious information-technology executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages.

Link to the Yahoo! news article

Scriblist founder, Patrick Horne, says:

Scriblist.com is a new creative writing website which offers something just a little bit different. Aspiring authors are invited to enter submissions for the first chapter of a story with all entries posted directly onto the site. Each user then has the opportunity to vote for their favourite submissions and a panel of judges will select the winning chapters from the highest rated entries. The competition in each succeeding month will be to write further chapters to follow on from the winning entries.

This project began with a concern about the dramatic decrease in reading and writing, particularly for young people, even in the era of Harry Potter. Young people are all familiar with the Internet and Scriblist.com will use modern technology to help revive interest in creative writing. The site is open to anyone of any age who is interested in writing. We believe that many people working collaboratively can produce work which is as good as or even better than anything that one person might produce by themselves.

The project offers prizes for the author of each chapter chosen for publication (a delicious-looking iPod Shuffle) as well as royalties from the published book. As an added incentive to encourage younger authors, Scriblist.com will also offer prizes to schools, colleges and universities should any of their students provide one of the chosen winning contributions.

The submission window for the first chapter closes February 4.

Link to the Scriblist home page.

Interesting Washington Post article by a high-school librarian about the decline in literacy among today’s youth:

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. “A lot out there is conspiring to distract you,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s your opinion about books. It doesn’t make it true.” To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Susan Patron has won the John Newbery Medal for her novel The Higher Power of Lucky, illustrated by Matt Phelan (S&S/Jackson), and David Wiesner won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for Flotsam (Clarion). Wiesner had won the Caldecott twice previously, for The Three Pigs and Tuesday, and a Caldecott Honor for Sector 7. The awards were announced this morning at the ALA’s midwinter conference in Seattle.

View the rest of the award winners in the Publishers Weekly article; Yahoo! News has an article on the same subject here.