News From Nowhere 3 - 2013 in Review

A slow start to the year was livened up by news that Dan Brown was set to release a novel based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The novel, Inferno, was eventually released in May, prompting a rash of unfunny parody reviews (mainly written by people who hadn’t read the book yet) which were possibly even more irksome than Brown himself. January 21^st was the inaugural Orwell Day, marked by a season of readings on Radio 4 and a two minutes’ hate in the Daily Mail. Infernos and left-wing politics were also in the news in February as Freedom Press, Britain’s oldest radical bookshop, was burned down, but re-opened days later after a clear-up. The cause of the blaze was arson, rather than the incendiary quality of their stock.

March saw the emergence of two stories which would come to dominate the literary year - the avarice of Amazon, and Jonathan Franzen’s anti-technology moaning. It has become increasingly clear that, to borrow Dean Martin’s phrase, ‘it’s Jeff Bezos’ world, we’re all just living it’. The Amazon boss’s insatiable lust for data, and love of vertical integration, manifested itself in the purchase of Goodreads, potentially giving his company access to the reading habits of 16 million users. So far, there’s been little noticeable change to the site, but it’s doubtful that the increasing homogenisation of the online books world can be a good thing. Franzen, meanwhile, decried Twitter as ‘irresponsible’, saying ‘it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters… like writing a novel without the letter ‘p’’. Georges Perec, who wrote one without the letter ‘e’, was unavailable for comment, having died in 1982.

Also in March, The Folio Society announced the launch of a £40,000 literary prize, to be judged by members of the Folio Academy. The international flavour of the award may have been a contributing factor to the Booker Prize’s decision to open up to America. Behind the scenes, however, the society is going through massive changes, including some big-name redundancies and the closure of its US office, so whether that £40k will be money well spent or not remains to be seen.

One of the strangest literary stories of the year began in April, with the announcement that the feminist journal Spare Rib was to be relaunched. The news came as a surprise to many, not least the original founders of the magazine, who had heard nothing about it at all. Threats of legal action followed and the magazine was promptly re-named, first as Hip Bone, before finally emerging online as The Feminist Times. In other re-naming news, The Cuckoo’s Calling, the debut novel by author Robert Galbraith, came out in April, attracting reasonable reviews, but failing to make any impact on the best-seller lists, until it was revealed that ‘Galbraith’ was in fact JK Rowling operating under a nom de false. There was much hand-wringing about what this said about gender and book-sales, but surely the real point was that even with strong reviews, it is harder than ever for first-time authors to shift copies.

Also dominating headlines in April was the once-a-decade announcement of Granta’s Best of Young British Writers list. The list featured writers from a broad range of backgrounds, and featured a female majority for the first time, but the anthology itself was rather underwhelming. Possibly in reaction to the muted press response, owner Sigrid Rausing oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the business, but there was a happy ending as the publisher emerged triumphant in both the Women’s Prize and the Booker.

June saw the announcement that the Women’s Prize for Fiction would be sponsored by Bailey’s from 2014. The news met with a cool reaction from the likes of Brooke Magnanti, who described Bailey’s as ‘the hen weekend of booze. Over cloying, over sweetened… one can hardly imagine Hilary Mantel knocking back dainty glasses of the stuff’. At least it wasn't Tampax, I suppose. Further controversy followed with the announcement of an all-white judging panel in November.  

Jane Austen also hit the headlines, with the decision to remove Mary Wollstonecraft from banknotes generating anger. The campaign to have Austen’s image on the £10 note was a great example of grass-roots activism creating change, even if it was slightly undermined by the fact that we don’t really know what she looked like. Another old author making waves over the summer was John Williams, whose 1965 novel Stoner became the de riguer tube read for anyone working in publishing. And to round off a month where everyone was getting over-heated, Scarlett Johansson announced her intention to sue a French author who had included a ScarJo lookalike in his novel. The case could have serious ramifications for writers who include real people in their work; I suppose we should all be grateful that Will Self seems to have a sense of humour, after seeing what Sam Mills did to him in her novel Quiddity…

The big industry news of the summer was the announcement of the merger between Random House and Penguin. The new company will control up to a quarter of the world book industry, leaving many authors and agents worried. It has also attracted criticism for refusing to call itself ‘Random Penguin’; in protest, this website has dedicated itself to posting pictures of Penguin and Random House books with an arbitrary flightless bird added to the cover.

September saw the end of civilization as we know it, as the Booker prize was opened up to American authors and the Penguin Classics brand got into bed with a washed-up indie icon. The Booker announcement was met with great cries of ‘woe’ from the likes of Philip Hensher, although underwhelming recent novels from the likes of Dave Eggers and Donna Tartt suggest that Commonwealth authors might not have too much to worry about.

Morrissey is no stranger to cancelling tours, so perhaps news that his autobiography was being shelved shouldn’t have been a surprise, except that he hadn’t even bothered to announce its release first this time. Fortunately for fans of hubris this all turned out to be a cynical marketing ploy, and his Autobiography duly took its place alongside the likes of Herodotus in the Penguin Classics range on its release in October. In more heartening news, author James Patterson announced his intention to donate $1 million to independent bookshops, particularly those with a children’s section.

In October, Eleanor Catton became the first natural blonde to win the Booker Prize since Pat Barker in 1995, with her second novel The Luminaries. The occasion was marked with great dignity by the press, which obviously focused on the literary merit of her work rather than talking about handbags and hair pigmentation. In another example of undignified media behaviour, Noel Gallagher used the occasion of the GQ Awards to give us the benefit of his thoughts on literature, viz ‘book titles are too confusing’. An excellent summary of his thoughts can be found here.

WH Smiths were forced to suspend e-book sales on their website, after discovering that naughty self-published authors were selling erotica on there, and talking of cock-ups, there were red faces at Jonathan Cape, who accidentally inserted a portion of David Jason’s autobiography into early editions of the new Bridget Jones novel. Still, it’s not like it became one of the fastest-selling books of the year, probably no-one noticed.

Autumn saw awards season begin in earnest, and 2013 turned out to be a great year for independent publishers winning prizes; apart from the success of Granta at the Women’s Prize and Booker, the Goldsmith’s prize was awarded to Eimear McBride for her surprise success A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar), the inaugural Gordon Burns Prize went to Ben Myers for Pig Iron (Bluemoose) and David Constantine’s Tea at the Midland and Other Stories (Comma Press) picked up the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Short stories were also of the day in the Nobel Prize for Literature, which went to Alice Munro, while Manil Suri beat off stiff competition to win the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award.

In November, Marvel comics introduced Kamala Khan, a 16 year old Muslim superhero, which makes them a bit more right on than DC, who banned Batwoman from having a gay wedding. Amazon proposed that in the next few decades they would begin delivering your books and DVDs via unmanned drone, so we can expect packages of hardback books to start being dropped on the heads of unsuspecting wedding parties around 2030; Waterstone's undercut this rather dystopian futurevision by retorting that they were going to use owls for their deliveries. And just to prove that nobody can agree about anything in literature, academics at Manchester University suggested that we’d been getting the first sentence of Beowulf wrong for the past couple of centuries.