The 2014 Dylan Thomas award, which comes with a £30,000 cash prize, has been given to Joshua Ferris for his novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The award goes to any thirty-nine-year-old playwright, novelist, or poet.
Twitter has plans to open an office in Hong Kong in early 2015. The office will mainly house sales staff, charged with working with advertisers, especially Chinese companies “looking to go global.” Seventy-seven percent of Twitter users are outside of the US, but only 34 percent of the company’s revenue has international origins. Twitter hasn’t been allowed in China since 2009.
At Vanity Fair, a long piece from Keith Gessen on the Amazon conflict. “The size of the self-publishing program alone within Amazon is already so large,” Gessen reports, that “some believe that statistics about book publishing in general can no longer be trusted. Some huge and growing part of the market is simply unaccounted for.”
The beloved DC bookstore Politics and Prose will open mini-stores in all but one of the six Busboys and Poets restaurants.
Matt Bissonnette, the former Navy SEAL who wrote a book about the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed, is suing his lawyers. The Justice Department conducted a criminal probe after the book, No Easy Deal (2012), was published (it appears under the pseudonym Mark Owen). Bissonnette blames his “tarnished reputation” on the lawyers’ failure to advise him to submit the book to governmental agencies for pre-publication review. He also blames them for having to give up most of the book’s proceeds, losses that, he claims, will amount to close to $8 million.