Winnipeg novelist Méira Cook received a coveted endorsement for her new novel The Full Catastrophe recently when Oprah Winfrey’s Oprah Daily website added the novel to a list of “Pride and Joy” books for Pride Month.

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Winnipeg novelist Méira Cook received a coveted endorsement for her new novel The Full Catastrophe recently when Oprah Winfrey’s Oprah Daily website added the novel to a list of “Pride and Joy” books for Pride Month.

The new novel, about an intersex boy and his family, “celebrates the beauty in the diversity of bodies and the cultivation of one’s found as well as one’s given family,” stated the article on the site.

Manchester United and England soccer star Marcus Rashford only read his first book at the age of 17, but says it changed the direction of his life.

With that in mind, he teamed up with Macmillan Children’s Books to create the Marcus Rashford Book Club, which has provided some 100,000 free books to kids in the U.K.

This summer, the club will give away 50,000 copies of the kids’ book Rashford co-wrote with Alex Falase-Koya, The Breakfast Club Adventures: The Beast Beyond the Fence. Previous titles given away through the program were A Dinosaur Ate My Sister by Pooja Puri, illustrated by Allen Fatimaharan, and Silas and the Marvellous Misfits, written and illustrated by Tom Percival. Another title will be picked for a fall giveaway.

“It’s time to put physical books back on the endangered list.”

That’s the alarming forecast of Sutherland House publisher Ken Whyte in a recent edition of his newsletter, in which he discussed the growing difficulty of acquiring paper for book printing.

Whyte notes in the blog post that ebooks had much earlier been expected to take over from printed books. But that didn’t happen, largely because of a strong preference among many readers for the physical object.

Now, though, with paper mills shut down around the world as a result of reduced demand for paper in a world of ever-shrinking newspapers and magazines, the remaining mills can’t keep up with the demand from the book business and as a result are increasing their prices. Factor in the increased cost of distribution resulting from higher fuel costs, he says, and the “$35 paperback” may be just around the corner.

Such a price increase may drive more readers toward ebooks, Whyte writes.

A Washington, D.C. judge is expected to hear 72 hours of arguments this month in a trial over the U.S. government’s attempt to block the merger of publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

The witness list for the trial includes the CEOs of the big five publishers, several leading literary agents and author Stephen King (listed as a witness for the Department of Justice).

The government argues that the merger of the two publishers would reduce competition among publishers for rights to authors’ work, according to Publishers’ Weekly. A merged Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster would be more than twice as large as the second-largest publisher in the U.S.

You’re never too old or too young to be in the running for the most prestigious English language literary award in the world.

The Booker Prize revealed a 13-book long list recently that included the oldest author ever nominated for the prize — 88-year-old Alan Garner, nominated for his novel Treacle Walker — and the youngest, 20-year-old Leila Mottley, nominated for Nightcrawling.

Another superlative on the list goes to Clare Keegan, whose novel Small Things Like These, at 116 pages, is now the shortest to be nominated for the award.

Previously nominated authors on the list are NoViolet Bulawayo (Glory), Karen Joy Fowler (Booth), Graeme Macrae Burnet (Case Study) and Elizabeth Strout (Oh William). Six authors on the list are from the U.S., with others from the U.K., Zimbabwe and Ireland and none from Canada. Until recently, only authors from the Commonwealth and Ireland were eligible.

A short list will be announced Sept. 6, and the winner will be announced Oct. 17.