Fiction Publishers Embrace Multiple Formats (Plus a Very Important Anniversary)

It’s literary prize season and publishers have clearly gotten the memo about readers’ preferred formats.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist, announced last week, includes two first-time novelists and four books from independent publishers. The prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.

Of the six writers, two have enjoyed success with the prize in the past. Julian Barnes has been shortlisted three times, while Carol Birch was longlisted in 2003. Two Canadian writers feature on the shortlist -- Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan --  along with four British novelists.

As of mid-September, the format information for the six novels in the shortlist was as follows:

• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, Random House. [Scheduled for early October in the USA, in hardcover, audio, and ebook from Knopf]
• Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie. Published in the UK by Canongate Books, and in the USA by Doubleday.(hardcover, paper, audio, and ebook)
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers. Published in the UK by Granta and in the USA by Ecco. (hardcover, paper, audio, and ebook)
• Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues. Published in the UK by Serpent's Tail; USA publishing plans unknown.
• Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English. Published in the UK by Bloomsbury and in the USA by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (hardcover, paperback, audio, and ebook)
• A.D. Miller, Snowdrops. Published in the UK by Atlantic and in the USA by Doubleday. (hardcover, audio, and ebook)

You’ll find a bit of background on the original 138-title list, narrowed to 13 for the longlist, on The Daily Beast.  And if you are still committed to reading in print, you might want to check out this review of the cover art for the shortlisted books.

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 18 at a dinner at London’s Guildhall and will be broadcast on the BBC.  Each of the six shortlisted authors will receive £2,500, while the winner will receive an additional £50,000. 

Meanwhile, the twenty finalists for the 62nd National Book Awards will be announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting's morning radio program, Think Out Loud, in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Oregon  at 9:06 a.m. PST on October 12. The announcement will also be streamed live on Oregon Public Broadcasting's website.

And now for that very important date:

On this day in 1982, Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, suggested on an online bulletin board that the users type a colon, a hyphen, and a closing parenthesis when their post was intended as a joke. LOL.