The 2014 Hugo Awards, which honor science fiction, have been announced. The award for best novel goes to Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (Orbit US / Orbit UK). This year Hugo nominees were more likely to be women and people of color than has historically been true, the Daily Dot reports.
The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Weiner, who complains that she was “devastated” when she heard that Jennifer Egan had advised women not to write chick lit. About Lena Dunham, who has said that she loathed “airport chick lit,” Weiner says, “I’m sure she has just no clue that these books she’s reviled may have in some teeny, tiny way made her show possible.”
And the Guardian profiles Phyllis Rose, whose book, The Shelf, was published earlier this year. About the rise of the “bibliomemoir,” Rose acknowledges that such books are perhaps evidence of a sad state of affairs. “There is this movement to cherish what we have before it is lost,” she says. “‘Crisis’ would sound melodramatic. But certainly, we are taking it less for granted; we’re trying to hold on to something before it disappears.” Diane Mehta interviewed Rose for Bookforum.
One of the metrics that Time Inc. uses to evaluate writers is how “beneficial” their work is to the company’s relationship with advertisers, Gawker reports. A union representative claims that writers have been terminated based on this criterion, including four writer-editors on whose behalf the Newspaper Guild has filed an arbitration demand.
The letters to Amazon continue: A thousand writers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have signed a statement protesting the company’s practices. “Amazon’s customers have, until now, had the impression that these lists are not manipulated and they could trust Amazon. Apparently that is not the case,” the letter reads. “Amazon manipulates recommendation lists. Amazon uses authors and their books as a bargaining chip to exact deeper [e-book] discounts.” Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (from Austria) was among the signers.