Loose Leaves

Englander stories collect Frank O'Connor prize:Nathan Englander has won this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Weidenfeld Nicolson).

The €25,000 award – the most lucrative for a short-story collection – is presented by Munster Literature Centre and funded by Cork City Council, although there is some uncertainty about how long that sponsorship will continue. The American author (below) will be in Ireland in September to receive the prestigious prize during Cork International Short Story Festival. This year’s judges include the poet James Harpur, the novelist Mary Leland and the literary programmer Ann Luttrell. They said the choice of Englander from a very strong international shortlist was a majority decision and that they were “impressed by the seasoned maturity shown by the author in stories multilayered in meaning and written in an austere, contemporary idiom applied to ancient ethnic themes”.

Could an Eason ereader rival charms of Nook book?

The opening of the refurbished Eason store on Patrick Street in Cork this week came with a tantalisingly brief mention that the bookseller is developing an ereader. No other details are available, such as when it will be in the shop, the investment involved or, indeed, what the own-brand ereader might be called. Who could have predicted that the Nook, the ereader of the US bookselling giant Barnes Noble, and even the Kindle, from Amazon, would become trip-off-the-tongue brands?

Eason has sold Sony ereaders for the past three years, and the refurbished shops – Belfast, Cork and, next, O’Connell Street in Dublin – all have wifi areas for shoppers to download books from the Eason website. Earlier this year Waterstones whipped up controversy by linking up with Amazon so that shoppers in the chain’s stores could download books from the Amazon site to their Kindles. Critics likened the move to a turkey voting for Christmas, but Waterstones said it believed there was no point developing its own ereader when so many good ones were already available. Eason will be hoping to rival the success of the Nook, which has taken a big chunk of the US ebook market.

Something old, something renewed

In the flurry to keep up with technology it's easy to forget that very old books still exist and need to be protected. The Heritage Council and the Chester Beatty Library are offering a year-long internship in paper conservation, based at the library. It comes with a stipend of €26,700. Candidates should be recent graduates (2010-2012) of a recognised book- or paper- conservation training programme. The deadline for applications is Friday, July 27th. See cbl.ie.

Fifty shades of saturation smacks of Thwackery

If you have been banging your head rhythmically off a wall and moaning, “Make it stop” – not in a vogueish, pretend-sexy, sadomasochistic sort of way but in response to the tsunami of coverage relating to the Fifty Shades of Grey series – then bad news: it’s set to continue as publishers try to ride on the lucrative success of the phenomenon. In September Michael O’Mara will publish a humorous mash-up between the mommy porn and Pride and Prejudice (cue grave-spinning in the Austen burial plot) called Fifty Shades of Mr Darcy, by a writer with the nom de plume William Codpiece Thwackery. Or you could amuse yourself by watching the hilarious clip on YouTube of Ellen DeGeneres attempting to record the audiobook of Fifty Shades of Grey.