Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, an eight-hundred-plus page novel set in 19th century New Zealand. And that’s not all: at 28, she’s the youngest Booker winner ever.
There are 300,000 people in Iceland, and according to recent statistics, one in ten of them will eventually publish a book. This might account for the Icelandic phrase “ad ganga med bok I maganum”—that every Icelander “has a book in their stomach.”
A textbook rental company in Sydney Australia has partnered with a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones, to develop what is likely the world’s first drone-driven textbook delivery service. The service uses the GPS coordinates of a customer’s smartphone to figure out where to deliver the book.
Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks will narrate a new series of audiobooks focused on “storytelling in American history.” The series is curated by Hanks and documentarian Ken Burns, and will include Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, among other books.
Ronan Farrow—activist, Yale law school grad, and son of Mia Farrow (and possibly Frank Sinatra)—will soon add “author” to his list of credentials. This week, Farrow announced that he’ll be publishing his first book, an American military history, with Penguin. Pandora’s Box: How American Military Aid Creates America’s Enemies is a “personal exploration of a generation’s struggle with how to stand with its government without losing its principles.” It’s scheduled to come out in 2015.
Glenn Greenwald, one of the two main journalists responsible for breaking the Edward Snowden story, has announced that he’s leaving the Guardian for “a brand-new, large-scale, broadly-focused media outlet,” which is as-of-yet unnamed. Elaborating on his new employer, Greenwald described it as “a general media outlet and news site—it’s going to have sports and entertainment and features. I’m working on the whole thing but the political journalism unit is my focus.” Though Greenwald will remain based in Brazil, the site’s offices will be in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He added that it’s “hired a fair number of people already.”