What I Saw and How I Lied, by Judy Blundell
by Lee Thomas
It’s 1947. You’re a 15-year-old girl with a movie-star gorgeous mother and a stepfather just back from World War II. Do you know what your parents are up to?
It’s 1947. You’re a 15-year-old girl with a movie-star gorgeous mother and a stepfather just back from World War II. Do you know what your parents are up to?
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.
Warm congratulations to FWR contributor Natalie Bakopoulos, whose story “Fresco, Byzantine,” was just selected for an O’Henry Prize! The story was published by Tin House in their fall 2008 Political Future Issue and will appear in the O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 anthology next year.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories (billed as a “novel in stories”) about a curmudgeonly retired schoolteacher in Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Finalists included Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Christine Schutt’s All Souls. You can read an excerpt from Olive Kitteridge here and the NY Times review here.
Even if you haven’t read his interview with Tobias Wolff or Jeremy’s interview with him on FWR, I hope you’ve all read Travis Holland’s astoundingly good, non-debutish debut novel The Archivist’s Story–which is now on the Impac Dublin shortlist, chosen over the works of literary heavyweights like Coetzee and Roth. Courtesy of the Guardian, here’s the full shortlist; the winner (who wins an award of €100,000) will be announced on June 11, 2009. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz Ravel by Jean Echenoz The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland The […]
Huzzah and huge congrats to Jeremy, FWR’s Associate Editor, whose story “What We Can” has captured the $1200 first prize in Glimmer Train‘s Family Matters contest. Runners-up were, for second place, Yuval Zalkow for “God and Buses,” and for third place, Adam Theron-Lee Rensch for “Everything in Its Right Place.” The full list of finalists is available as a PDF here. Be sure to check out Glimmer Train‘s Summer 2010 issue, where “What We Can” will appear, or get a jump on it and subscribe now to one of FWR’s favorite literary magazines.
Warm congratulations to friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan, whose debut story collection Say You’re One of Them has won the Africa regional for the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book Award. Africa’s Best Book Award winner is South African writer Mandla Langa, for The Lost Colours of the Chameleon. The authors will each go on to compete for the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in their respective categories.
Congratulations to Salvatore Scibona for winning the 9th annual Young Lions Fiction Award!! Sponsored by the New York Public Library, this $10,000 prize honors a writer who, at age 35 or younger, has made “an indelible impression on the world of literature” with a novel or story collection. The four finalists were: Jon Fasman, The Unpossessed City Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances (FWR’s review coming soon) Sana Krasikov, One More Year (see FWR’s review here) Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey And check out Fiction Writers Review this weekend for an interview with Salvatore Scibona; a review of The […]
The National Book Critics Circle announced 2008’s award winners on Thursday: Fiction: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, trans. by Natasha Wimmer (FSG) Poetry: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler (FSG) and Half the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera (U of Arizona Pr) Criticism: Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer (U of Chicago Pr) Biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (Knopf) Autobiography: My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar (Algonquin) Nonfiction: […]
This £10,000 prize will be awarded in May by Arts Council England (with Champagne Tattinger). Here, as listed on The Bookseller, are the longlisted books, whose English translations each published in the UK in 2008. The shortlist will be announced on April 1, 2009. My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia) The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello) Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) Night […]
