I’m a few days behind, so forgive the belated announcement: HuffPo Books is now live, and its content so far – a mix of blog posts and multimedia features (some interactive) — looks exciting! On Oct. 6, Arianna Huffington announced her first book club pick, a 2004 nonfiction title from HarperOne: In Praise of Slowness: [...]
Warm congratulations, Uwem. FWR is thrilled that so many more people will know about and read your stories because of this endorsement. And Oprah, kudos for picking a story collection!
Learn more about Say You’re One of Them here; read “An Ex-Mas Feast,” the collection’s first story (previously published in the New Yorker); and check out [...]
This month, Andrew’s UP pick is Triple Time (U of Pittsburgh Press), Anne Sanow’s debut collection of linked stories about life in modern Saudi Arabia and 2009 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Via the author’s website:
For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” [...]
Politico.com is calling Obama “the next Oprah.” The president’s widely circulated summer reading list seems to have given every book on it a huge bump in sales, as indicated by these Amazon rankings (stats are via Politico) BEFORE = on Monday, before Obama’s list was released / AFTER = as of Wednesday):
- The Way Home [...]
This is strictly gossip at this point, but another FWR contributor whispered in my virtual ear that the debut collection by our friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan has a shot at being the next Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Others across the blogosphere are also betting on Say You’re One of Them as a strong possibility: [...]
Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, Nov. 2008), is about twin brothers navigating life after high school in a small Gulf Coast town. Where the Line Bleeds is an Essence Book Club Selection, a 2009 Honor Award recipient from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jesmyn Ward’s essays and fiction have been published in Oxford American, A Public Space, and Bomb magazines. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and she is currently entering her second year as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Nico Berry spoke to the author by phone as she soaked up the summer heat back home in DeLisle, Mississippi.
This month, Andrew recommends Victoria Patterson’s debut collection of linked stories, Drift, as his big-house pick. Read more about it here; you can read one of the collection’s stories, “The First and Second Time,” on the Freight Stories website.
For August, Andrew also introduces a new feature, ABC Rewind, which he describes as “spotlight[ing] story collections [...]
Andrew’s Book Club recommends Josh Weil’s debut collection, The New Valley (Grove), as June’s Big House pick and Midge Raymond’s Forgetting English (Eastern Washington UP), winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, as its University Press pick. Also new on the ABC site is Andrew’s interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell, whose story collection American [...]
For Short Story Month itself, Andrew recommends the following collections:
Indie Press: The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell (Graywolf)
University Press: American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Wayne State UP, from the Made in Michigan Writers Series)
Andrew’s Book Club also currently features an interview with author Tracy Winn, whose debut collection of linked [...]
Here they are, the April collections Andrew urges us to buy, read, and recommend. This month, all three books are debuts. Viva la short story–and the emerging writer!
University Press Pick: Tracy Winn’s Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist UP)
Indie Pick: Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore (Sarabande)
Big House Pick: Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the [...]
