Virtual Friendship

3.17.15

These days, friendships are often formed over the Internet. Have you corresponded with someone via a social networking site or dating site who you’ve never met in person? This week, write a poem about what you imagine meeting this person would be like. If you’ve never seen a picture of him or her, write about what you think this person looks like based on how he or she writes. 

Black Balloon Announces Book Prize Winner

Black Balloon Publishing, an imprint of the newly established Catapult, has announced Tegan Nia Swanson as the winner of the 2014 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for her debut novel, Things We Found When the Water Went Down. The annual award includes a prize of $5,000 and publication for a novel or short story collection.

The editors selected Swanson’s book from more than 1,500 submissions. “Tegan’s novel is organized as a series of artifacts,” says Black Balloon associate editor Julie Buntin. “Reading Things We Found When the Water Went Down is a process of discovery, of excavation, and it’s precisely this narrative ambition that makes the book such a perfect fit for this prize. I had the sense while turning the pages that I was in the presence of something new.”

Swanson is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, where she was the 2011 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Bellingham Review, and Connu, and in the Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal. She won the 2013 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2014 Fiction Fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She currently lives in Lyon, France.

Things We Found When the Water Went Down will be published by Black Balloon in the fall of 2016, and will be distributed by Publishers Group West. The finalists for this year’s prize were Anne Corbitt, Joan Frank, and Karen Tucker.

Founded in 2013, the prize is named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a one-eyed, one-armed British naval commander made famous for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars—a man “who defied convention at every turn.” 

Mike Meginnins won the inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for his debut novel, Fat Man and Little Boy, which was published in October 2014.

Jamie Brickhouse

"Reading other people's stories has always helped me with my own story.... I can pull the feelings and emotions away." Author Jamie Brickhouse discusses his memoir, Dangerous When Wet, forthcoming in April from St. Martin's Press.

Rankine, Robinson, and Chast Win NBCC Awards

The winners of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night at the New School in New York City. Claudia Rankine, whose poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press) was the first book in the NBCC’s history to be nominated in two categories—poetry and criticism—took home the award in poetry. Marilynne Robinson won in fiction for her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and Roz Chast won the autobiography prize for her graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury).John Lahr won in biography for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton); David Brion Davis won in general nonfiction for The Problem of Slavery In the Age of Emancipation (Knopf); and the criticism prize was awarded posthumously to Ellen Willis for The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Willis’s daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz. Phil Klay won the John Leonard Prize for his National Book Award–winning short story collection, Redeployment (Penguin Press); the John Leonard Prize recognizes an outstanding first book in any genre. Alexandra Schwartz, an assistant editor at the New Yorker, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

The poetry finalists were Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), Willie Perdomo’s The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books), Christian Wiman’s Once in the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Jake Adam York’s Abide (Southern Illinois University Press).

The finalists in fiction were Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press), Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead), Lily King’s Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead).

The autobiography finalists were Blake Bailey’s The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (Norton), Lacy M. Johnson’s The Other Side (Tin House), Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (Random House), and Meline Toumani’s There Was and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books).

Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are considered amongst the most prestigious awards given in the literary world, are given annually for books published in the previous year. A board of twenty-four working newspaper and magazine critics and editors nominates and selects the winners each year. The 2013 winners included Frank Bidart for poetry and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for fiction.

Photos from left to right: Claudia Rankine (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times), Marilynne Robinson (Ulf Andersen/Getty), and Roz Chast (Bill Franzen/Washington Post)

Tribute to Terry Pratchett

"I never set out to write literature... but certainly I've had a lot of fun over the past twenty-five years." Sir Terry Pratchett, who passed away yesterday at the age of sixty-six, is honored in this video montage compiled by the Telegraph. Best known for his Discworld series of novels, Pratchett was knighted for his services to literature in 2009, and received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010.

PEN/Faulkner Award Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been announced. The annual award honors the best work of fiction published by an American author in the previous year.

The five finalists are Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press), Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen (Hogarth), Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life (Tyrant Books), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf), and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Knopf). More information about the finalists can be found on the PEN/Faulkner website.

The winner of the $15,000 prize will be announced April 7. The four remaining finalists will each receive $5,000. All finalists will be honored during the annual PEN/Faulkner Award Ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., on May 2. The ceremony, which will be hosted by B. J. Novak, is open to the public; tickets are available online or can be purchased by calling the Folger Box Office at 202-544-7077.

Judges Alexander Chee, Marc Fitten, and Deirdre McNamer selected this year’s finalists from 360 novels and short story collections from 142 publishing houses. In a press release, the judges said of their selection process, “The finalists we chose are writing some of the best of American fiction now—urgent and profound work that is deeply engaged with our world, even as it redefines what we call ‘American fiction,’ and what we think of as America.”

Now in its thirty-fifth year, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is sponsored by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and is the largest peer-judged fiction award in the United States. Karen Joy Fowler won the 2014 award for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the award in 2013 for his short story collection Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club.

 

One Hundred Words

3.12.15

This week, write an essay using exactly one hundred words. Pick a concept you’ve been thinking about recently, like daylight savings time, or a personal story someone’s reminded you of recently, like when you learned to ride a bike. It doesn’t take long to write one hundred words, but you must make every one of them count.

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