Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland has won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. If you want to read more about the book, Natalie Bakopoulos wrote an in-depth review of Netherland and its reviews for FWR last year. The PEN/Faulkner finalists were: Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, A Person of Interest by Susan Choi, Lush Life by Richard Price (see FWR’s discussion review), and Serena by Ron Rash.
The 2009 South East Asia and Pacific regional short lists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize have been announced, and FWR contributor Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day made the cut for Best First Book. Congratulations, Preeta!! Here are the short lists: Best Book Aravind Adiga, Between The Assassinations Helen Garner, The Spare Room Joan London, The Good Parents Paula Morris, Forbidden Cities Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap Tim Winton, Breath Best First Book Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger Nam Le, The Boat Mo Zhi Hong, The Year of The Shanghai Shark Bridget van der Zijpp, Misconduct Preeta Samarasan, Evening is […]
On the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, Michael Lukas worries that AWP’s heightened emphasis on the short story is a contributing factor to what he calls the “Short Story Bubble”–and its eventual burst. I’m not sure I entirely buy his argument, but hey, it’s worth discussing… All around the country, thousands of young fiction writers are scribbling furiously, focusing their creative and psychological energies on producing and publishing short stories, not necessarily because the short story is their favorite form. But, rather, because it’s the form best suited to the workshop, because they think it’s the easiest way to get published, […]
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Hyphen announced today that Shivani Manghnani‘s “Playing the Sheik” has won their 2008 Short Story Contest. The story will appear this April in Hyphen‘s Issue 17. Among the finalists is FWR contributor Celeste Ng, for her story “Girls, At Play.” Congrats to Shivani, and to Celeste and the other finalists! The AAWW is currently selling raffle tickets ($20 apiece) to raise money for the Workshop and support Asian American literature. The prize, should you wish to enter, is this rather fetching Vespa.
Earlier this fall, School Library Journal published an article called “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?”, sparking a heated debate about criteria for what has long been recognized as the most prestigious prize in children’s literature. Are the latest Newbery medal-winning books really too “inaccessible” for kids? Should accessibility and popularity be issues in determining a winner? Are popularity and quality mutually exclusive? Does the Newbery tend to favor “good” books over “great” ones? What responsibility does the award have to young readers? What do you think?
Big congratulations to Uwem, for securing the #1 spot on Entertainment Weekly‘s best book (fiction) of the year list!! Here’s their list of 2008’s “10 must-reads”–and here is Jennifer Reese’s review of the book from June.
In his wonderful Nobel lecture, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues passionately why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society, responding in particular to Stig Dagerman’s Essäer och texter. I greatly admire how this speech–like the best fiction–is at once intimate and inclusive, intensely personal yet widely relevant. Some choice excerpts: If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. The writer, the poet, […]
Non-profit publisher Dzanc awards this annual $5,000 prize based on (1) the quality of a writer’s work and (2) a proposal to undertake a specific community service project. This year’s winner, Kodi Scheer, will lead three 10-week writing workshops for patients, caregivers, and staff at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at U-Mich’s hospital. A recent graduate of the Michigan MFA program, Scheer was the recipient of the 2008 Creative Writing Prize for outstanding MFA thesis, and her stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Quarterly West. She is writing a story collection with the working title Gross Anatomy. To read […]
Preeta Samarasan‘s Evening is the Whole Day is getting some well-deserved list love. For the Guardian‘s best books of 2008, Ann Tyler names the novel as one of her top three (along with two other books reviewed on FWR, Miriam Towes’s The Flying Troutmans and Richard Price’s Lush Life), and Ali Smith also chooses it (along with Toni Morrision’s A Mercy and the reprint of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity) for the Times Literary Supplement‘s Books of the Year List. Congratulations, Preeta! And thanks to fabulous lit-blogger Bibliobibuli for the news and links.
Warm congratulations to Hannah Tinti! Check out the story here. Bonus: Hannah is guest-teaching my fiction workshop tomorrow. As a longtime fan of her work (and a One Story subscriber) I am thrilled to formally meet her and introduce her to my students. And a review of the dazzling The Good Thief is forthcoming (this weekend or next week) on FWR.
