Wednesday News: Apple announces new products, Barnes & Noble loses less money this quarter, Man Booker Prize is now multinational, and victim blaming Janay Rice
Publishing NewsApple / Apple Watch / Barnes & Noble / Booker Prize / diversity / domestic violence / iPhone / literary prizes / NFL / Race16 Comments
Apple Watch, iPhone 6, and More: The Apple Announcement from A to Z – So the dreamers were correct – Apple did, indeed, introduce three new products, including two new iPhones and the much anticipated Apple Watch, which holds absolutely no appeal for me (yet), but will at least stop all the speculation. Apple also introduced iOS 8, and managed to get U2 to show up live and give away a song for free on iTunes. I’m personally most excited about the larger screen sizes on the new iPhones.
F is for Fanboy/Fangirl. You know who you are. You buy a new Apple device every single year. You line up outside Apple Stores waiting for it to appear. You pick fights with Phandroids (aka Google Android fans) about what phone had which feature first. You are in hog heaven right about now.
… and also for Fitness. A new app designed to give you a comprehensive view of your daily activity, via the watch’s motion-tracking sensors.
… and also for Four Point Seven and Five Point Five. Those are the screen sizes of the two new iPhones, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. They’re substantially larger than the iPhone 5s but are more in line with the size of competing Android phones. –Yahoo Tech
Loss Expected to Narrow for Barnes & Noble – So here’s some cautiously good news: Barnes & Noble is losing less money this quarter than it did during the same quarter last year. Could the partnership with Google be breaching the gap? Whatever the cause, let’s hope the trend continues.
Analysts are projecting a loss of 22 cents per share for the fiscal year. After being $1.33 billion a year ago, analysts project revenue to drop 5% year-over-year to $1.26 billion for the quarter. For the year, revenue is projected to roll in at $6.10 billion –Forbes
Two Americans on Man Booker Prize shortlist – Despite the US-centric title of this article, the real news here is that the Booker has expanded to allow books from any country, as long as they are written in English and published in the UK. Along with the two US authors (with Karen Joy Fowler the only woman), there were three British authors and one Australian, so it’s not exactly powerhouse diversity here, but since it took almost 50 years for the current change to occur, who knows how long it will take to really diversify the award.
In other award news, though:
Louise Erdrich has been named winner of the 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
. . .
Ursula K. Le Guin has been named winner of the National Book Foundation’s 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She will receive this honor at the 65th National Book Awards ceremony in New York on Nov. 19. –Washington Post
Don’t watch the Ray Rice video. Don’t ask why Janay Palmer married him. Ask why anyone would blame a victim – A great piece on the aftermath of the release of the Ray Rice domestic violence video, in particular the persistent victim blaming we’re seeing pretty much everywhere. You can’t help but think about this piece in tandem with The Economist’s review of the Baptist book on slavery.
The Root has a piece detailing some of the “worst responses” to the video if you want to witness the awfulness.
And if you haven’t seen the video yet, be warned: it’s incredibly disturbing.
That we feel entitled (and excited) to access gut-wrenching images of a woman being abused – to be entranced by the looks of domestic violence – speaks volumes not only about the man who battered her, but also about we who gaze in parasitic rapture. We click and consume, comment and carry on. What are we saying about ourselves when we place (black) women’s pain under a microscope only to better consume the full kaleidoscope of their suffering?
. . .
Black women are often systematically excluded from both the category of “woman” and that of “victim”. Our pain, these days as ever, can never be pure enough. –The Guardian
“and managed to get U2 to show up live and give away a song for free on iTunes”
It’s actually the whole album :)
I have to buy it!
I have not watched the Rice footage, and I have avoided reading about the whole things as much as possible because what little I’ve heard (from co-workers) immediately blamed her for marrying him after the beating. Most repeated, “she married him for the money, what did she expect?”–which makes me see red.
Unless we’ve been there ourselves, we don’t know what victims of abuse go through, what they feel, how they think about themselves and their circumstances, whether there is anyone in their lives who can, or has even tried, to help them.
Count me as one of the people who was sad to see the Booker expand to include US entries (because while technically it expanded to increase all English-language entries, in practice this is about putting US books on the list). I guess that counts as diversity, but it’s not as if US writers don’t have a slew of high-profile prizes to compete for already. The Booker (Man Booker, etc.) highlighted Commonwealth books and brought attention to a lot of authors who were writing about post-colonial issues, issues of hybridity, etc. I think this reduces the likelihood of those kinds of books winning regularly, frankly, and I don’t know that that’s a particularly good thing. Nothing against the books that were nominated, but it’s not the same prize anymore.
And The Root: Really? We needed that?
I’m with Sunita’s take on the Booker. It could certainly have done a better job in the past of including books from across the Commonwealth in its lists, but the change is likely to mean mostly the presence of more American writers who are already getting a lot of prizes and attention. That’s certainly true of Fowler and Ferris. I’ve loved books by both of them (though I haven’t read these) but a book about the angst of a New York dentist isn’t really the kind of diversity I think the big prizes need most.
I have used Booker nominees and winners to help me find books that may not have pinged my radar on this side of the pond.
Bugger that.
Am I the only one wondering what all the hoopla is about? So Apple finally released bigger screens and a smart watch. What’s so innovative about that? No doubt the iPhone 6 will be one of the best smart phones available but there’s nothing all that innovative about offering bigger screens and different colors or more processing. And a smart watch is a pretty straight forward smart phone companion piece and is hardly the first being marketed.
It seems to me like Apple is now the one playing catch up with Android by finally offering one that one phone. I’m more interested in what they come up with next that (to paraphrase Tim Cook) we never knew we couldn’t live without.
As an American, even I agree that opening the Man Booker Prize to American entries is going to change that landscape greatly. Creeping homogenization.
I thought it interesting timing that I received an email from Amazon yesterday regarding the Apple/ebook settlement. (Maybe I just have a suspicious nature.)
I was also sad about the Booker prize – I find it hard enough to discover non-American authors and their books, and the last thing I need is another channel alerting me to the same US authors I already know about. (I have another set of sighing over the many books I want to read but that take years to get English translations because it’s assumed no one outside the country will want to read them.)
Ray Rice video – I’ve worked hard on not seeing it, being careful what links I’ll click. I keep worrying someone’s going to make still images of it or worse, a gif. Because you know someone already has, somewhere. Ugh.
I’m not an Apple fan. Had an iTunes gift card given to me, decided to buy a book with it and discovered I can’t buy it in a way that allows me to put it onto my Kobo. That is so annoying.
I actually really like the Man Booker longlist this year. I’ve read 6 out of the 13, and really loved 5 of those (the 6th was merely pretty good). In previous years, there have been several I tried and just didn’t get on with.
The diversity issue does bother me, though. For starters, 3 out of 13 women, when it was more 50-50 last year. I don’t think we can blame the inclusion of US authors for that, though, since 2 of those 3 women are Siri Hustvedt and Karen Joy Fowler.
As for the lack of Commonwealth authors, yes, that’s a shame. I have loved discovering some books I’d never have heard of without the prize. We do need to look a bit deeper than just the citizenships of authors, though. Neel Mukherjee, on this year’s shortlist, is counted as a British author even though he was born in India and it sounds like his entire novel is set in India (I haven’t read it yet, but I will). Whereas two of the books in last year’s shortlist that would be counted as Commonwealth (The Lowland and We Need New Names) had as their main themes the immigrant experience in the US, and a lot of the action in each of them was set there.
@AMK: Thank you!
Re. the Man Booker, there is no reason that internationalizing the award needs to result in US domination. In fact, it should be otherwise, especially given the historical interest of the prize in issues of colonialism and identity. I know that there was criticism of the judges this year, particularly in regard to their diversity, so I’ll be interested to see what happens next year. More recently, I’ve been up and down with how I think the prize has been representing some of historical concerns, so I’m really hoping that international eligibility will encourage and reveal some new voices.
@Robin/Janet: The thing is that it was already an international award, restricted to UK and Commonwealth countries. Most English speaking authors other than Americans were already eligible. So the change is specifically designed to allow US authors to be eligible, and given the size and influence of the US publishing industry, it’s hard to see how they won’t dominate in future.
@Rosario: I agree this isn’t at all about the quality or origin of this year’s longlist or shortlist; I think we’ll have to see how things play out over the next few years. I’m less interested in the citizenship of the authors than in their backgrounds, which may or may not overlap with their passports (although I realize you’re probably talking about the formal rules). And I certainly don’t have a problem with writers setting books in the US, it’s more the idea that so many US authors’ books are now eligible.
It’s hard for me to imagine that the big (male) US names wouldn’t have won the Booker over its 40-year history had they been eligible, and it’s equally hard for me to argue that the prize would have been life-changing for them the way it has been for other authors.
@Robin/Janet: Given how keenly I can still remember Salman Rushie winning for Midnight’s Children, and the effect it had on Indian readers (in English) and on Indian English fiction more generally, I certainly agree that getting new voices is important. But the Booker has always tilted toward the big nations in its shortlists and winners. If you look at the last 40 years of finalists, the UK (mostly England) and India figure prominently (with UK/England way out in front). As a Guardian article today notes, no Scottish woman has ever won (not even Muriel Spark) and no Scottish man since James Kelman. In many ways it’s that the shortlist that has propelled less well known authors from smaller countries into the spotlight, and hopefully that will continue. But I cannot think of one good literary reason for US authors to have access to a Commonwealth prize. We are emphatically NOT part of the Commonwealth, politically, culturally, or otherwise, our “special relationship” notwithstanding. If the diverse US voices aren’t being sufficiently recognized, maybe we should clean up our own awards houses before colonizing elsewhere.
The Booker has regularly had pushback over the nature of its selection process (e.g. the “readability” debate, the choice of judges, the recurring worry that challenging books are not being selected, and in the last decade, the dominance of male authors except for Hilary Mantel). I’m just not optimistic this will make it better, although I imagine US attention will help it gain more US publicity. Which I guess was the point. There’s nothing in the Commonwealth like the NY litfic publicity machine.