No Pulitzer, No Problem : The BookPundit 2012 Award for Fiction Goes to Germany's Nele Neuhaus

[crossposted from BookPundit]

No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012?
No problem.

How about an alternative reward for Nele Neuhaus, Germany's best-selling crime novelist?

As written at Agence Hoffman:

"Nele Neuhaus is the most successful German crime writer. She took the bestseller lists by storm with SCHNEEWITTCHEN MUSS STERBEN/Snow White must die and WER WIND SÄT.*

Nele Neuhaus' gripping novels are set in the Taunus mountains, where the author lives. www.neleneuhaus.de"

* We add here our footnote translation of "Wer Wind Sät" as "If You Sow Wind", based on the German phrase that whoever sows wind, will reap a whirlwind.

So we herewith award The BookPundit Fiction Prize for 2012 to Nele Neuahus, who writes "Taunus, Germany-based" complex crime novels in German dealing with modern topics such as wind energy and environmental politics, for example, which she then weaves into the magically interlaced substance of her marvelous criminal mystery novels. The results are outstanding.

This award, by the way, is not connected with any other benefit other than this simple recognition of her excellent book writing.

We initially became aware of the works of Nele Neuhaus after asking at the local library what novels were currently being borrowed the most and was told "the crime series of books of Nele Neuhaus". Well, so we loaned out a book.

Her books are a series of crime squad investigations led by Inspector Oliver von Bodenstein and his colleague Pia Kirchhoff. The books are well researched and the author works together with real crime investigation professionals to get the crime details right. A truly great, almost natural gift for writing adds the rest.

Our own bookseller regards Tiefe Wunde ("Deep Wounds") as the best book by Nele Neuhaus thus far and it is the third book in the series. Google Translator translates the short description of Tiefe Wunde at Amazon.de as follows:

"The 92-year-old Holocaust survivor David Joshua Goldberg is killed at his home in the Taunus with a neck shot. At autopsy, the doctor makes a strange discovery: Goldberg's arm bears the remains of a blood group tattoo, as it was customary for members of the SS. Then ... two more murders [occur], executions. What mystery linked the victims to each other? The investigations lead ... Chief Inspector Oliver Bodenstein and his colleague Pia Kirchhoff far into the past ...[to] East Prussia in January 1945 ... 

Nearly 200 enthusiastic readers ... on 22 August 2009, [experienced] the book launch of 'Deep Wounds' at the Kempinski Hotel in Königstein [in the Taunus]."

Well, if you read German, you are lucky, because you can enjoy the Neuhaus crime novels. We assume the publisher will bring English-language versions soon, but we can not guarantee it.

Maybe the best thing they could do this year was not to award the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. They would have missed Neuhaus anyway.

Ancient Signs The Alphabet & The Origins of Writing

Ancient Signs: The Alphabet and the Origins of Writing
by Andis Kaulins is now available in 4 versions
(b/w, color, and both of those also as ebooks)
at
http://www.epubli.de/shop/autor/Andis-Kaulins/3682.

In Ancient Signs, the author traces the origins of writing and the alphabet to syllabic writing systems in ancient cultures and shows that these have one common origin.

print b/w version black and white inside

B/W inside
200 pages, 90 gram paper
Price: €35.99 (about US $47 on day of posting)
for the B/W print version of Ancient Signs
Ancient Signs traces the origins of the alphabet
to syllabic writing.
Softcover - print b/w, cover in color

eBook b/w version black and white version
B/W inside
200 pages
Price: €27.99 (about US $37 on day of posting)
for the B/W eBook version of Ancient Signs
Ancient Signs traces the origins of the alphabet
to syllabic writing.
  

color print version color inside
COLOR inside
200 pages, 150 gram glossy paper
Price: €149.00 (about US $196 on day of posting)
for the color print version of Ancient Signs
Ancient Signs traces the origins of the alphabet
to syllabic writing.
Hardcover - print and cover in color
 

color eBook version color inside
COLOR inside
200 pages
Price: €39.99 (about US $52 on day of posting)
for the color inside eBook version of Ancient Signs
Ancient Signs traces the origins of the alphabet
to syllabic writing.

Enjoy Reading.

The Writing Woman: Petra A. Bauer

The Writing Woman: Petra A. Bauer

see Petra A. Bauer, Freelance Writer | German Author, Blogger and Journalist | writingwoman.de

The Next Literary Movement is the Brain as the Humanities are Throttled by High Tech

At Next Big Thing - Literary Scholars Turn to Science - NYTimes.com Patricia Cohen writes:

"Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories."

Copyrights, Originality and Authenticity: Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann - a New but Partly Cribbed Novel about Sex, Drugs and Clubbing

Copyright infringing plagiarism or literary remix?

In Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism, Nicholas Kulish at the NYTimes.com informs us that Helene Hegemann, a mere 17 years old - but daughter of Carl Hegemann, one of the most prominent and innovative dramaturgs in Europe, now a Professor at the Department of Dramaturgy in Leipzig - seems to be following in her father's footsteps and has landed a beststeller in Germany with her first book, Axolotl Roadkill, a novel just announced as a finalist for the $20,000 fiction prize of the Leipzig Book Fair - a nice gesture to one of their own?

It was Carl Hegemann:

"[W]ho developed the theoretical superstructure for this hybrid artistry: "A reality is no longer encountered, but brought forth by the ‘members’ of a culture.”

But who really wrote this book?

One major problem with the book - as it turns out - is that:

"[A] blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes."

As written in Helene Hegemann, the art of cut and paste in the Berliner Zeitung in picking the "European of the 'Week":

"Helene Hegemann says she’s sorry, she knows it was wrong “not to mention all the people whose writings helped me”. And yet she stands by her novel: after all, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, there’s only authenticity”. What’s more, she’s only a “lodger” in her own mind: “I help myself to whatever inspires me.”"

One has to wonder about whether the father had his hand in the pie in this one.

Writers Can Prosper Without Intellectual Property - Gennady Stolyarov II - Mises Institute

Writers Can Prosper Without Intellectual Property
by Gennady Stolyarov II - Mises Institute

"It is commonly supposed that, whatever its moral and theoretical standing, intellectual property is necessary for creators of written works to make a living and — even more importantly — to continue to create. Here, I will set aside the theoretical status of copyright, which is amply discussed in Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property and Michele Boldrin and David Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly. I will focus on existing and emerging possibilities for writers to earn a living in a world where no copyrights exist."

A Vintage Caper ? Why hasn't Peter Mayle's new book been published in Britain? – Telegraph Blogs

A Vintage Caper ?
Why hasn't Peter Mayle's new book been published in Britain? – Telegraph Blogs

Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter

Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter

Goodreads | The 2009 Goodreads Choice Awards

Goodreads | The 2009 Goodreads Choice Awards

Google Books : Google is sued by Chinese author Mian Mian, China's Literary Wild Child : Sex Drugs Rock & Roll

Everybody is now getting into the act of suing search engines for including scanned excerpts of their books in search results. See, for example:

BBC News - Google is sued by Chinese author Mian Mian

My own book, Stars, Stones and Scholars is found at Google Books and I am very pleased about it, since it makes that book much more accessible to millions of potential readers. Indeed, links are offered to major online booksellers where the book can be purchased. Below is a scan of the front cover website page at Google Books of Stars Stones and Scholars by Andis Kaulins:


People who are interested in the book's amazing subject matter buy the book.

Charles Dickens: Looking over the Shoulder of the Creator of “A Christmas Carol” - The New York Times

Charles Dickens becomes more and more actual as Christmas approaches. Take a look at Looking over the Shoulder of the Creator of “A Christmas Carol” - The New York Times.

First European Prize for Literature Awarded in 2009 to Authors From 12 Countries - 23 to Follow in 2010 and 2011

The first European Prize for Literature, "[a] European Prize for emerging talents in the field of contemporary fiction", was awarded September 28, 2009, to 12 authors from 12 European countries - with 12 more authors from 12 other European countries to be selected in 2010, and 11 more authors from the remaining 11 other European countries to be selected in 2011. The announcing press release stated:

"The names of twelve European authors to receive the first ever European Union Prize for Literature were announced today by the European Commission, the European Booksellers Federation (EBF), the European Writers' Council (EWC) and the Federation of European Publishers (FEP).... In recognition of his oeuvre and literary success Henning Mankell, the well-known and bestselling Swedish author, has accepted the role of Ambassador of the European Union Prize for Literature for this year." [links added by this blog]

The idea, at the onset of this award, is for the prize to work as a medium of activation for European culture and to "highlight and promote the full diversity of European literature." After each European country has been honored at least once, the award is likely to be reduced to only a few authors, but from our point of view we definitely find the current process to be far more favorable. Very few books, in spite of their literary quality, span all cultures, so that a limited award necessarily involves national prejudices as to content, style and language.

For example, a universally-acclaimed book - not eligible for this award -like the 1995 Der Vorleser (The Reader) by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink is very rare. It was the first German book ever to reach the top of the New York Times Best-Seller Lists and last year the book was even made into a very successful Hollywood movie - The Reader. But most fiction is limited by the audience of the nation in which the author is located.

This European literary award was presented at a gala ceremony in Brussels, Belgium, attended by ca. 800 dignitaries, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

The works that received the prize are detailed at this .pdf.

Hat tip to Leigh Phillips at the EU Observer.

Novelists Ken Follett, J.K. Rowling, Nick Hornby, and John Grisham : Scribd and the Issue of Copyrights and the Uploading of Book Texts Online

Scribd is becoming a force to be reckoned with on the Internet.

At ScribdBlog in their posting What ever happened to Fact Checking?, the Scribd Team goes one on one with the Times of London on copyright issues relating to Scribd, involving such famous novelists as J.K. Rowling, Ken Follett, Nick Hornby and John Grisham, who has the current Number 3 Bestseller on the New York Times list of hardcover fiction with his book, of all things, called The Associate, which Patrick Anderson of the The Washington Post calls "A DEVASTATING PORTRAIT OF THE BIG-TIME, BIG-BUCKS LEGAL WORLD."

We were gratified (but of course "legally shocked") at the Times of London article which incurred Scribd's wrath to learn that immensely popular and writingly gifted novelist Ken Follett's World without End (a New York Times No. 1 bestseller) had been uploaded to Scribd and had been viewed 500 times in five months.

We recently uploaded some of our own published works to Scribd. After only one month we have more than 500 views of two of our documents:

The Norse Pharaohs: Astronomical Decipherments re Tanum Hierakonpolis Nazca Sahara Near East DOC

The Origin of the Cult of Horus in Predynastic Egypt DOC

We are strongly considering entry into the publishing field with a novel of our own. Ken Follett and cohorts, look out, there is competition on the way!

Robert Frank classic The Americans published in a new version

The Americans
in German, "Die Amerikaner"
and in Chinese "美国人".
I got this book for my birthday this past December.

If you are down about the American economy and the prospects for 2009 and beyond, don't be. Take a look at this book - and at this first link about that book - to see how greatly much of America has changed in the 50+ years since the mid-1950's. Obama's America in 2009 is a vastly different place than shown in the photographs in "The Americans".

As written by Philip Gefter at the New York Times (Art & Design section online):

"“The Americans,” [is] an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s."

The Americans, by Robert Frank, a classic photographic study of the United States in the 1950's, was first published May 15, 1958, by Robert Delpire in Paris, followed by an English edition in 1959 via Grove Press in New York, in which the original French language by Alain Bosquet about American history was replaced by an introduction and captions in English by Jack Kerouac.

As written at aloHAA:

"The end result [of Frank's photographic journey through the USA in the 1950's] was the 83 images in the book that no American publisher would touch. It took a Frenchman, Robert Delpire, to publish “Les Americains” in 1958. Progressive publisher Barney Rosset produced the first American edition under his Grove Press the following year. Frank revealed a harsh, sometimes divided America that was a lot different from the rah-rah ’50s dream of “Father Knows Best.” His out-of-the-box compositions paved the way for William Eggleston’s profound color images of America that have garnered unanimous applause in the Whitney’s “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera.” “No one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half-century than the Swiss-born Mr. Frank, though his reputation rests almost entirely on a single book published five decades ago,” writes Philip Gefter in the New York Times. "

The German publisher Steidl in Göttingen,
together with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
in 2008 published a new version of the book in three languages:

English,
German (translation by Hans Wolf)
and Chinese (see e.g. 罗伯特·弗兰克的《美国人》 “The Americans” by Robert Frank).

Frank, 83 years old at the date of publication - a number which corresponds to the 83 tritone plates in the book, chosen out of 20,000 photographs - worked intensively himself on this new version of his now classic book, including for example using some negatives varying from previous editions.

The 13-character ISBN for the English version of the book is: 978-3-86521-584-0.
The 13-character ISBN for the German version of the book is: 978-3-86521-658-8.
The 13-character ISBN for the Chinese version of the book is: 978-3-86521-657-1.

This book is a "must have" for any library that includes materials on America.

For those of my friends in Nebraska, where I grew up, two of the plates in the book are from Nebraska, one of highway 30 between Ogallala and North Platte, and the other of Hested's department store in Lincoln. I've seen both, and, yes, that's exactly the way it looked.

The Case of the Harry Potter Lexicon : J.K. Rowling vs. the Cyclopians (Encyclopedians)

The Harry Potter Lexicon is in the news, as J.K. Rowling battles the Cyclopians (encyclopedians).

RDR Books writes:

"HARRY POTTER LEXICON CASE UPDATE
New York Federal District Court Judge Robert Patterson has scheduled a trial for March 24, 25 and 26 in the matter of Warner Bros. Entertainment and J.K. Rowling v. RDR Books. The judge consolidated a previously scheduled injunction hearing with the trial. The plaintiffs want to block publication of librarian Steve Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon. Here is the RDR Books statement on the case:

In this action, a distinguished and tremendously successful novelist demands the suppression of a reference guide to her works. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, asserts that this reference guide infringes both her copyright in the seven Potter novels and her right to publish, at some unidentified point in the future, a reference guide of her own. In support of her position she appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides, and other non-academic research, relating to her own fiction.

This is a right no court has ever recognized. It has little to recommend it. If accepted, it would dramatically extend the reach of copyright protection, and eliminate an entire genre of literary supplements: third party reference guides to fiction, which for centuries have helped readers better access, understand and enjoy literary works. By extension, it would threaten not just reference guides, but encyclopedias, glossaries, indexes, and other tools that provide useful information about copyrighted works. Ms. Rowling's intellectual property rights simply do not extend so far and, even if they did, she has not shown that the publication of this reference guide poses a sufficient threat of irreparable harm to justify an injunction. Her preliminary injunction motion should be denied.

Read RDR Books' Opposition Brief filed by our attorneys David Hammer, Lizbeth Hasse, Anthony Falzone, Julie Ahrens and Robert Handelsman. Also filed was expert witness testimony on the Harry Potter Lexicon by Professor Janet Sorenson of the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. Have a look at this exhibit, a thank you note from Scholastic Publication Potterologist and editor Cheryl Klein to Steve Vander Ark. All available background information on the Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit is available here.

Media contacts for the Harry Potter Lexicon Case

One of the great intellectual property law cases of our time, a dramatic work with a platinum cast, has been underway for some time now in the trademark and copyright infringement action by Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling against RDR Books, makers of an allegedly unauthorized Harry Potter Encyclopedia, who we here thus dub the Cyclopians.

Joe Nocera at the New York Times in A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity wrote on February 9, 2008:

"On Friday, a lawyer named Anthony Falzone filed his side’s first big brief in the case of Warner Bros. Entertainment and J. K. Rowling v. RDR Books. Mr. Falzone is employed by Stanford Law School, where he heads up the Fair Use Project, which was founded several years ago by Lawrence Lessig, perhaps the law school’s best-known professor. Mr. Falzone and the other lawyers at the Fair Use Project are siding with the defendant, RDR Books, a small book publisher based in Muskegon, Mich. As you can see from the titans who have brought the suit, RDR Books needs all the legal firepower it can muster."

The Leaky Cauldron informs us that a trial date has now been set.

The Guardian writes on March 11, 2008:

"On one side: global-celebrity author JK Rowling. On the other: an amateur fan site devoted to the world's favourite boy wizard. At stake: the soul of Harry Potter."

We saw a vision of Hedwig bringing in the last issues of US Reports by mail the other day to deal with a case of mysterious first impression?
WHOO can be sure?



As The Guardian writes, all wizards of the legal powers convene:

"[O]n March 24 when a New York court considers the injunction that Rowling and Warner Brothers have taken out against a small, Michigan-based publisher, RDR Books, to prevent publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon, an A-Z guide to all things Hogwarts. It could also be a landmark case, because what is at stake is not just an author's right to control the publication of secondary works but also the right to publish in book form information that has been previously available on the web."

Keep your dragons at bay!

What does the law of superheros tell us about the rights of mere mortals?

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Update with some links about the case found online:

From Stanford's Fair Use Project

Nice posting and lots of comments at Crooked Timber

P2PNet and P2PNet-again

The Online Harry Potter Lexicon of the Challenged Book

The J.K. Rowling Official Site praising the online website

RDR Books

Steve Vander Ark at the UrbanWire. As written at UrbanWire:

"Steve Vander Ark, 46, a librarian for a K-8 school in Michigan and the resident director for the Caledonia Community Players, and published compiler of an encyclopaedia of Star Trek the Next Generation, is renowned throughout the Harry Potter Fandom online for creating The Harry Potter Lexicon - the first, and only complete online encyclopaedic companion to the Harry Potter books. Started in the year 2000, The Harry Potter Lexicon contains every single fact, feature, character and detail from the books in a systematic catalogue, and was recently awarded the third prestigious Fan Site Award [by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling on her official site.] Steve is also an active speaker at Harry Potter-related academic symposiums held in America."

Read the rest here at UrbanWire.

Library Journal where Rowling says the book is a "Harry Potter rip-off"

Beattie's Book Blog