The 2008 National Book Awards ceremony was held Wednesday night at Cipriani on Wall Street in downtown New York City. Cipriani was a new location for the awards. Host Eric Bogosian opened the ceremony by noting that Barack Obama’s win in the Presidential election is good news for many, including those attending the awards ceremony because he “is a reader and a writer.” Obama’s election was, in fact, a recurring theme among the evening speakers.

Silverstone to Rodale Pam Krauss at Rodale preempted a diet book by actress and animal rights advocate Alicia Silverstone, tentatively titled The Kind Diet; Peter Steinberg sold world rights. By exploring the connection between what we put in our bodies and what we’re doing to the planet, the book will help readers choose the right foods in the kitchen; it will include a three-step diet program…

Another Buffett John Glusman at Harmony beat four other bidders in an auction for Peter Buffett’s Life Is What You Make It; Richard Pine at InkWell sold North American rights. Buffett, who forsook the chance to join his father’s business to pursue his own passion for music, will write about values, identity and growing up as one of Warren Buffett’s sons; as a young man, he wa…

Action Masters Putnam editor-in-chief Neil Nyren has acquired a new novel by Frederick Forsyth, tentatively titled The Cobra, in a North American rights deal with Ed Victor. Forsyth’s 13th novel, The Afghan, was published by Putnam in 2006; they expect to bring out the new one late in 2010.

The 2008 National Book Awards ceremony was held Wednesday night at Cipriani on Wall Street in downtown New York City. Cipriani was a new location for the awards. Host Eric Bogosian opened the ceremony by noting that Barack Obama’s win in the Presidential election is good news for many, including those attending the awards ceremony because he “is a reader and a writer.” Obama’s election was, in fact, a recurring theme among the evening speakers.

In his first memoir, Hands of My Father (Reviews, Oct. 20), children’s book author Myron Uhlberg writes of being a hearing child brought up by deaf parents. Do you think having American Sign Language as your first language helped you develop the creativity to become a writer? It played a very important part.

In Eclipse (Reviews, Oct. 20), Richard North Patterson focuses on an American lawyer’s desperate struggle to save an embattled freedom fighter in an oil-rich African nation that resembles Nigeria. Was there a particular event that led to your writing this book? The genesis of Eclipse lies in tragic events that occurred in Nigeria almost 15 years ago, when a courageous environmental and hu…

Many small press books aren’t for everyone, and with modest print runs, they are not meant to be. While there may be 2,000 people who want to read a book like Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings—a collection of essays, with the middles missing, published by Sarabande in 2007—they probably don’t live near each other or read the same magazines.

Hallie Ephron—in wire-rimmed glasses, a black turtleneck and moonstone ring (“like in Wilkie Collins”)—is digging into a plate of Indian food in a glass-walled restaurant above Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. It’s an autumn New England day, not unlike the November morning when a yard sale upends the life of Ivy Rose, the pregnant woman protagonist in Ephron’s first st…

In his first memoir, Hands of My Father (Reviews, Oct. 20), children’s book author Myron Uhlberg writes of being a hearing child brought up by deaf parents. Do you think having American Sign Language as your first language helped you develop the creativity to become a writer? It played a very important part.