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“I left Indiana and drove towards happiness.” Watch the book trailer for John W. Evans's second memoir, Should I Still Wish (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The Lacuna, the center of the Bay Area Book Festival, is an outdoor interactive library made out of fifty thousand free books donated by the Internet Archive and constructed by the FLUX Foundation.
Ayelet Waldman talks about her family history, working in different styles of writing, and sharing a moving moment with an elderly reader in this video for the World Affairs Council. Waldman’s first memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life (Knopf, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The holiday shopping craze over Hatchimals may seem unprecedented, but there have been many comparably popular gift toys over the years—including Tickle Me Elmo, Transformers toys, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the Atari game system—with some parents even admitting the possibility that their excitement over procuring the gift might in fact be greater than the child’s excitement to receive it. Write a personal essay about a toy you were given as a gift when you were a child. Why was it important to you? Was your attachment to the toy connected to memories of the gift giver, a festive event, playing with friends, or something else entirely?
The New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief talks with musician Ben Arthur about her music, inspiration, distraction, adaptation, and her new book about the Los Angeles Public Library fire in 1986.
Writing about trauma is sometimes called “navel-gazing,” particularly for women writers. An essayist and memoirist confronts this stigma, and calls on writers to explore their personal traumas and truths.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One highlights the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women and Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World, offering a glimpse into the worlds of these new and noteworthy titles.
Literary MagNet highlights an author alongside the journals that have published that author’s work. This issue’s MagNet features Aaron Gilbreath, who takes us through five journals that first published essays appearing in his debut essay collection, Everything We Don’t Know (Curbside Splendor).
In this New Yorker video, Teju Cole, author of Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016), reflects on his American citizenship and Nigerian upbringing from his home in Brooklyn. Cole is featured in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
PEN America has announced the longlists for its 2017 PEN America Literary Awards in fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation. Each year PEN awards more than $150,000 to writers of poetry, fiction, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, and drama.
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000)
The semifinalists are The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood (Graywolf) by Belle Boggs; Known and Strange Things (Random House) by Teju Cole; Against Everything (Pantheon) by Mark Greif; A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (Simon & Schuster) by Siri Hustvedt; The Girls in My Town (University of New Mexico Press) by Angela Morales; Soul at the White Heat (Ecco) by Joyce Carol Oates; Becoming Earth (Red Hen) by Eva Saulitis; Ethics in the Real World (Princeton University Press) by Peter Singer; Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (Scribner) by Andrew Solomon; and Hungry Heart (Atria) by Jennifer Weiner.
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000)
The semifinalists are Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky) by Rion Amilcar Scott; We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout) by Clare Beams; The Mothers (Riverhead) by Brit Bennett; The Wangs vs. the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Jade Chang; When Watched (Penguin) by Leopoldine Core; Hide (Bloomsbury) by Matthew Griffin; Homegoing (Knopf) by Yaa Gyasi; Tuesday Nights in 1980 (Gallery) by Molly Prentiss; Hurt People (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Cote Smith; and Wreck and Order (Hogarth/Crown Publishing) by Hannah Tennant-Moore.
PEN Open Book Award for a book in any genre by a writer of color ($5,000)
The semifinalists are Blackass (Graywolf) by A. Igoni Barrett; Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt (Tim Duggan) by Yasmine El Rashidi; The Book of Memory (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Petina Gappah; The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James) by Jamaal May; Behold the Dreamers (Random House) by Imbolo Mbue; What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Riverhead) by Helen Oyeyemi; Look (Graywolf) by Solmaz Sharif; Problems (Coffee House) by Jade Sharma; Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press) by Safiya Sinclair; and Blackacre (Graywolf) by Monica Youn.
The finalists in several categories will be announced on January 18, and the winners will be announced February 22. The debut fiction and essay awards, as well as the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Nabokov Award, will be announced live at the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on March 27 in New York City.
For the complete list of semifinalists, including those in the categories of poetry and prose in translation, visit the PEN America website.
