Random House dropped from prize list
An American literary prize trust has blacklisted all Random House publications until The Jewel of Medina is published. The principled stance has been taken by the Langum Charitable Trust.
The founder of the trust, David Langum, gives the reasons for the decision:
No one should expect that publishers print every piece of trash that comes into their offices, and The Jewel of Medina may be neither good literature nor good history. That is beside the point since Random House had already paid a $100,000 advance, arranged for book club publication, and foreign publication. It changed course and self-censored solely on the political grounds of fear of offending Muslims or fomenting violence.
That form of cowardice will only lead to more and more of this form of self-censorship and is an attack on the integrity of literary publication. We must stand up to it, in whatever ways are available to us. The form that was available to our small foundation was to put Random House out of the running for our prizes
About time someone grew a pair.
[…] it, US literary prize the Langum Charitable Trust has said that it will refuse to consider titles (via) from the publisher until the book is published. “Random House has exhibited a degree of […]