Source: bbcnews

NEIL GAIMAN WINS BOOK PRIZE

Writer Neil Gaiman has won the prestigious children’s fiction prize – the Cilip Carnegie Medal – for his fantasy tale The Graveyard Book.

The novel, about an orphaned boy brought up by ghosts, has scored a literary double, having also won the Newbery Medal – the US equivalent of the Carnegie.

Gaiman, who grew up in the UK but now lives in the US, is best known for the Sandman comic series and his novels Stardust and Coraline – which became big-screen hits.

He was inspired to write The Graveyard Book when his son rode into a graveyard on his tricycle. The story echoes the plot of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in which orphan Mowgli who is brought up by animals in the jungle.

Read more here…

Source: forbesindia

THE PAPERBACK TURNS 75

It was the year 1966, and Paul McCartney wrote a song called Paperback Writer. It was about a writer who was desperate to get his work published. As it was then, so it is now. As it turns 75, the paperback book remains the sure way for a writer to reach the masses.

OK, we are cheating a bit. Strictly speaking, the paperback is a little older than 75. The first paperback got published in 1931. But this pioneering effort by German publisher Albatross Books failed to attract any takers. It was only in 1935 — when Sir Allen Lane launched the now legendary Penguin Books — that the paperback took off. The high quality books priced at 2.5 pence — the same as a pack of 10 cigarettes — were a runaway success. The age of the paperback was upon us.

Read more here…

Source: startelegram

SCOTT SIGLER PLAYS WITH SCIENCE FACT NOT SCIENCE FICTION

Scott Sigler’s techno-horror mash-up of a novel, Ancestor, on sale this week, has a little bit of everything: recklessly ambitious medical research, predator monsters bursting from the bellies of host cattle, heavily armed scientists and paramilitary types fighting the creatures and each other at a remote island facility and even a love story.

There’s nothing fundamentally new about it, structurally or stylistically. Bestselling authors James Rollins, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have written similar books. But the way that Sigler has become one of the genre’s new heavy hitters is unique.

Read more here…

Congrats to Neil Gaiman on winning the the Cilip Carnegie Medal!

Are you a fan of Scott Sigler? Which books have you read?