Midnight's Children Wins Best of Bookers

Received intelligence about plot at Jaipur literary event

(NEWSER) - Salman Rushdie has dropped out of India's top literary festival after hearing that assassins may have been planning to attend—and kill him. Powerful clerics had protested the author's attendance at the Jaipur festival, which opened today and was to feature Rushdie as a speaker. But "intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan" informed him "that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to 'eliminate' me," he said in a statement, according to the BBC . More»

Stephen King, Christopher Hitchens make the cut

(NEWSER) - If you need a book recommendation for holiday reading, look no further than the New York Times ' list of the 10 best books of the year. Five are fiction and five non-fiction:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: A time portal sends an English teacher back to 1958 to try and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. King reflects "on questions of memory, fate, and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America."
• Swamplandia! By Karen Russell: "Exuberantly inventive language" marks this story of "a heroine who is wise beyond her years" as she tries to preserve her family's way of life. Also, an alligator theme park is involved.

Lead character based on man who later killed his mother

(NEWSER) - A Florida man confessed to killing his mother in the same fashion as a recently published novel describes: by beating her, cutting her open, and removing her inner organs. And the author of the novel admits that he based his main character partially on his friend, Beau Bruneau, 29—the man now accused of murdering his mother on Oct. 30. "It was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence," Patrick Quéré tells the Miami Herald . "It took me a while to really believe it." More»

An editor was likely the one to polish her prose, says professor

(NEWSER) - Jane Austen is known as a “perfect stylist,” but those perfectly crafted sentences may not actually be hers. After studying 1,100 pages of Austen’s handwritten, unpublished manuscripts, an Oxford professor concluded that “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style … is simply not there,” she tells the BBC . In its place is a more free-flowing, somewhat untidy style, featuring limited punctuation. More»

Howard Jacobson's comic novel is 'profound,' 'wise'

(NEWSER) - The writer who once called the Man Booker Prize an "absolute abomination" was last night awarded the prize for his 11th novel, The Finkler Question. Howard Jacobson, who calls himself "the Jewish Jane Austen," was “truly flabbergasted” by the honor, reports the Telegraph . “I was beginning to look like I was the novelist that never, ever won the Booker Prize,” he says. "I’ve been around for nearly 30 years, but at least they’re discovering me." More»