American book prize blacklists Random House for self-censorship: Good, we need offending Rushdies more than we need appeasing Chamberlains
I’ve got a new hero – it’s called ‘The Langum Charitable Trust’:
An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it “will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates”. Random House dropped Jones’s novel, about the child bride of Muhammad, after it was warned that it posed a security risk akin to the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. A spokeman for the Langum Charitable Trust said:
“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.”
Brilliant.
I know that Random House won’t exactly go broke, because it now won’t win any of those $1,000 prizes but they won’t like this kind of publicity at all.
Of course, they will tell themselves that this story will go away and that it’s lots safer to be cowardly than principled anyway but it will, nevertheless, hurt their precious self-image – and that’s something.
Plus, others in the award-giving industry might follow this lead, and Random House would be in big trouble if they did.
Me, I’m an avid reader and even I hadn’t heard of the Langum Charitable Trust. Still, there are literary prizes that can turn almost any book into a bestseller – and Random House is big and publishes lots of books in many categories of fiction. If all the big prize organisations would boycot Random House, this would be very bad news for this weasely publisher.
It would easily lead to direct yearly losses of millions of dollars, when none of their books would get the kind of publicity that comes with winning, let’s say, a Hugo, a Silver dagger or Edgar Allan Poe, a Booker or Whitbread etcetera, etcerera.
What’s more, if this boycot would continue it would also mean that both literary agents and non-represented authors would hesitate to send new manuscripts to Random House. If you are an agent and you felt some manuscript had huge potential, would you send it to a publishing house that was boycotted by the literature prize industry?
So, let’s hope the rest of the prize industry will follow where The Langum Charitable Trust has lead – and wouldn’t it be great if book reviewers would also start a boycot of the cowards at Random House? No more Random book reviews in newspapers like The New York Times, or England’s Guardian, or in any of the specialist organisations like Kirkus, Tor and all the others?
That would really teach Random House not to kowtow to the psychopathic Islamist crowds. If the non-sociopathic reading world would boycot Random House, I somehow doubt that they’d make up for those financial losses by selling bomb making instructions and Kill-those-who-insult-Allah brochures to the book burning masses.
(Don’t buy this label!)
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