BTW News Brief

Finalists for Great Lakes Book Awards Announced

On July 13, the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA) announced the finalists for the 2005 Great Lakes Book Awards. The awards will be presented Friday, September 30, at a luncheon during the GLBA Fall Trade Show in Rosemont, Illinois. The winners will be announced in late August.

The finalists in the Fiction category are:

• At the Shores, Thomas Rogers (Other Press)
• The Bright Forever, Lee Martin (Random House/Shaye Areheart)
• The Circus in Winter, Cathy Day (Harcourt)
• How Like an Angel, Jack Driscoll (University of Michigan Press)
• The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle, Viking (Penguin Group)
• An Unfinished Season, Ward S. Just (Houghton Mifflin)

The awards luncheon will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Friday, October 8, 2004 at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan. Winners will receive promotion in the association's holiday catalog, $500, and an award designed and produced by Pewabic Pottery, a historic maker of art tiles, ceramics, and glazes, based in Detroit. For more information and the complete list of finalists, visit the GLBA website at www.books-glba.org/ or contact Jim Dana, GLBA executive director, at (616) 847-2460, or via e-mail, at [email protected].

Osnos Plans to Step Down

Peter Osnos, founder of Perseus Books Group's PublicAffairs Books imprint, will step down as publisher as soon as a successor is found. As reported in Crain's New York Business News, Osnos will assume the title of editor-at-large after a new publisher is selected. PublicAffairs publishes titles focused on politics and social issues, and recently closed a book deal with former high-ranking FBI official W. Mark Felt, the Watergate informant known as Deep Throat. Before founding PublicAffairs, Osnos was the publisher of Random House's Times Books division. In a press statement, Osnos said, "I wanted to focus my energies on the thing I really do best, which is acquiring and publishing and editing books."