Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Elizabeth Sifton, a veteran editor at the boutique publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has found herself at the center of a controversy surrounding the authorial origins of a prayer--“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change"--that has traditionally been attributed to her father, the Christian theologian Reinhold Neibuhr. Until very recently it was accepted that Neibuhr came up with the phrase in the early 1940s, but The Times reports today that a law librarian at Yale named Fred Shapiro has dug up evidence that it was actually invoked by various speakers around the U.S. as early as 1936.  read more »

Reporters at The Australian are trying to turn up the heat on Ishmael Beah, the former child soldier from Sierra Leone whose memoirs, A Long Way Gone, they have been questioning in print since last month. Over the weekend, the paper published a story describing records from Mr. Beah's time in grade school, which seem to indicate that he was enrolled there through March 1993. These records appear to contradict the account Mr. Beah gives in his book, according to which he fled from his home in January 1993 at the age of twelve after his village was attacked by rebels. According to the book, he enlisted as a soldier soon after, and fought in the civil war in Sierra Leone for almost three years before being rescued by UNICEF.  read more »

The National Book Critics Circle, an organization made up of about 700 active book critics, announced on Saturday the finalist pool for their end-of-year awards, which will be held in March.

The NBCC honors books in six categories: Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, and Poetry.

In industry terms, Knopf leads the pack with four nominations (including three in the biography category), followed by FSG at three. The Poetry category did not include a single book published by one of the major houses.

The full list of finalists after the jump—you’ll notice that Joyce Carol Oates rather distinguished herself, getting nods in both the autobiography category and the fiction category.

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As reported earlier, Tom Wolfe is working on a new novel set in Miami called Back to Blood, which will be published in 2009 by Little, Brown.

According to a press release, the book would deal with "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." The overriding theme, though, based on an interview with Mr. Wolfe, will be Miami's immigrant population, which he said includes Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Russians.

"My original subject was just immigration, not from any policy point of view, but just curiosity about what the life of recent immigrants is like, and how they feel when they come up against American culture or Americans in general," Mr. Wolfe said. "As far as I can tell there is no other city in the world [besides Miami] where more than half the population are people who arrived here within the last 50 years."  read more »