This year’s finalists for The Story Prize have been announced, and the competition is, as usual, staggering:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)
Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Even more remarkable, as Story Prize director Larry Dark points out, these are [...]

GalleyCat attended the recent National Book Awards and asked attendees for tips on how aspiring writers can survive the recession. The two-minute video includes advice from fiction finalists Bonnie Jo Campbell and Marcel Theroux , YA finalists Rita Williams Garcia and Laini Taylor, poetry finalist Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and nonfiction finalist Sean B. Carroll. [...]

The National Book Foundation has announced the 2009 National Book Award Finalists. Here are the contenders in fiction:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel [...]