G&A: The Contest Blog

Before we get to Gerald Howard's well-deserved honor, one thing needs to be said at the outset: If you haven't read Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg's 1978 biography of the quintessential, old-school book editor who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway at Scribner's, go find a used hardcover somewhere—or pick up the recently reissued paperback. It's a great and—in hindsight, in some ways—sad book: They don't make editors like Maxwell Perkins anymore. Or maybe they do and they just work in an industry that hardly resembles the one depicted in Berg's biography. One thing's certain: They still make editors who are worthy of receiving an award bearing the name of the great editor. Nan A. Talese. Gary Fisketjon. Drenka Willen. Jonathan Galassi. And now, Gerald Howard.

Howard, vice president and executive editor of Doubleday, recently received the fifth annual Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. Sponsored by New York City's Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, the award is given to an editor, publisher, or agent "who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured, and championed writers of fiction in the United States."

In Howard's long career in publishing, he's worked with such eminited authors as David Foster Wallace, Gordin Lish, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Ana Castillo, A. R. Ammons, and others. At Doubleday, where he's been since 1998, Howard has worked with Kate Christensen, Pat Barker, Walter Kirn, Chuck Palahniuk, and Gore Vidal. 

In announcing Howard as the winner, Peter Ginna, chairman of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, said, “Over the course of many years Gerald Howard has introduced and championed the work of a host of writers who have helped to push the boundaries of contemporary fiction. It's a pleasure to honor him with the 2009 Perkins Award.”

The award will be presented to Howard at the library's annual dinner on November 9.

Amazon and Penguin today named James King winner of the second annual Breakthrough Novel Award for Bill Warrington's Last Chance. "One of the best things you can say about a novel is that the story lingers after you finish it," said Sue Monk Kidd, a member of the contest's expert panel. "I have gone on thinking about this one without trying."

From the announcement: "King, an Ohio native and current resident of Wilton, Conn., has been a corporate communications specialist for the past 20 years, but dreamt of becoming a fiction writer since the age of six. In 2006, with the support and encouragement of his wife and two children, King decided to pursue his dream. He entered the Master of Arts program in creative writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., and when he completed his degree in May 2008, he had written most of what would become the novel Bill Warrington's Last Chance."

King will receive a publishing contract worth twenty-five thousand dollars from Penguin. This year's contest drew thousands of entries; the other finalists were Ian Gibson for "Stuff of Legends" and Brandi Lynn Ryder for "In Malice, Quite Close."

Chosen from a group of fourteen finalists that included American authors Evan S. Connell, E. L. Doctorow, and Joyce Carol Oates, Canadian author Alice Munro today was named winner of the third Man Booker International Prize. "I am totally amazed and delighted," the seventy-seven-year-old fiction writer said. The biannual award, sponsored by Man Group, the investment company and hedge fund that sponsors the annual Man Booker Prize, is worth around eighty-five thousand dollars.

The judges were Amit Chaudhuri, Andrey Kurkov, and Jane Smiley, who wrote in a joint statement: “Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, is the author of seventeen books, including Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), The Beggar’s Maid (1980), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), and Away From Her (2007). Her next collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October.

Below is a short interview with Munro that was produced in 2004, around the time her story collection Runaway was published. 

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announced today the winners of the twenty-second-annual translation prizes for fiction and nonfiction. The awards of ten thousand dollars each were given for English translations of French prose published last year. Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays won in fiction for their translation of Small Lives (Archipelago Books) by Pierre Michon. Matthew Cobb and Malcolm DeBevoise won in nonfiction for Life Explained (Yale University Press/Odile Jacob) by Michel Morange. The winners will be honored tonight at a ceremony at the Century Association in New York City.

“These translation awards are an important opportunity to bring publishing professionals, translators and writers together to draw public attention to outstanding translations of literary works—which can often go unnoticed,” said French-American Foundation program director Emma Archer in a press release. “Translation is key to perpetuating an ongoing conversation between cultures and to promote the circulation of literary works at a time where the dominant language is English."

Jurors for this year's competition were Linda Asher, Tom Bishop, Antoine Compagnon, Linda Coverdale, Richard Howard, and Lily Tuck. 

The University of Texas, Austin, recently announced that Sarah Bird and Diane Wilson are the winners of this year's Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowships. Both will receive a four-month stay at Paisano, a retreat west of Austin, and a monthly stipend of five thousand dollars. The fellowships, sponsored by the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters, allow Texas writers (or writers who have written significantly about Texas) to live and work at the late J. Frank Dobie’s 254-acre ranch.

And just who, exactly, was J. Frank Dobie? He was an old-school Texan who wrote a bunch of books, including Cow People (1964) and Rattlesnakes (1965), that depicted the good life in rural Texas. But don't take my word for it; watch the well-groomed gentleman in the video below. 

This time of year you can almost feel the collective anxiety of students across the country who already have or will soon graduate and face the job market. And this year, of course, nerves are a little more frayed than usual. As short story writer Donald Ray Pollock said, as he accepted the PEN American Center's $35,000 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship a couple nights ago, “This is a big deal for me. And it couldn’t come at a better time. I’m getting ready to get out of graduate school, and there are no jobs out there."

It may not be worth as much as Pollack's new fellowship, but the Nation has a contest that will help a couple winners out with a thousand dollars each—and, perhaps more important, publication in a weekly magazine with a circulation of around 180,000. This year's Nation Student Writing Contest, sponsored by the BIL Charitable Trust, aims to "recognize and reward the best in student writing and thinking." Matriculating high school students and undergraduates at American schools, colleges, and universities—as well as those receiving either high school or college degrees in 2009—are invited to submit essays of no more than eight hundred words that answer the following question:

How has the recession affected you, your family, or someone you know?

Two winners, one from high school and one from college, will receive a thousand dollars and a subscription to the Nation; five finalists will receive two hundred dollars and subscriptions. The winners will be published in the magazine and online; the finalists, only online.

The deadline is May 31. The winners will be announced September 15. Click here for complete guidelines.

"I don't want to read short fiction. I don't want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It's totally boring." Whether you agree with them or not, those words, spoken by agent Jeff Kleinman during the Agents and Editors interview published in the January/February 2009 issue, represent the views of a not-insignificant number of publishing professionals. (Which is partly why some people are trying to get a Short Story Month going, but that's another story.)

Fortunately, for short story writers (and readers) everywhere there are still contests like the annual Flannery O'Connor Awards series, which offers two prizes of $1,000 each and publication by University of Georgia Press for short story collections. Some great books have been published as a result of the competition: Just last fall, Andrew Porter's The Theory of Light and Matter and Peter Selgin's Drowning Lessons were published. And this fall will see the publication of last year's winners: Geoffrey Becker (Black Elvis) and Lori Ostlund (The Bigness of the World).

The University of Georgia Press recently named a new editor for the series, former Flannery O'Connor Award-winner Nancy Zafris, who offers a note about the blind selection process on the press's Web site. She also adds a little description of how she approaches her reading of the finalists as series editor: "I always begin with an open mind—a mood of receptivity. However, it is the author’s job to meet my expectations, my desire to be delighted or charmed or moved. This means that writers need to work very hard on their opening pages. Tell your story in your own (authentic) quiet or loud or funny voice and I’ll give your story a chance."

If you want to give her a chance to give you a chance, submit your story collection by May 31.