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"Twenty-two stories about the magic of useless things" promises the book trailer for Dolan Morgan's new collection of short stories, Insignificana (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Civil Coping Mechanisms was featured in Small Press Points in the May/June 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The winners of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. The winners include Ross Gay in poetry for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press), Paul Beatty in fiction for The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maggie Nelson in criticism for The Argonauts (Graywolf Press), and Margo Jefferson in autobiography for Negroland (Pantheon).
Charlotte Gordon won in biography for Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House), and Sam Quinones won in nonfiction for Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury). Kirstin Valdez Quade won the John Leonard Prize—given for an outstanding first book in any genre—for her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (Norton). Carlos Lozada, an associate editor and nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Wendell Berry, the author of eight novels, two story collections, twenty-eight books of poetry, and thirty-one books of nonfiction, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
The finalists in poetry were Terrance Hayes for How to Be Drawn (Penguin), Ada Limón for Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions), Sinéad Morrissey for Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Frank Stanford for What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).
The fiction finalists were Lauren Groff for Fates and Furies (Riverhead), Valeria Luiselli for The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press), Anthony Marra for The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth), and Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen (Penguin Press).
The finalists in criticism were Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau), Leo Damrosch for Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press), Colm Tóibín for On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press), and James Wood for The Nearest Thing to Life (Brandeis University Press).
The finalists in autobiography were Elizabeth Alexander for The Light of the World (Grand Central), Vivian Gornick for The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), George Hodgman for Bettyville (Viking), and Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk (Grove Press).
Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are among the most prestigious prizes for literature, 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 2014 winners included Claudia Rankine in poetry, Marilynne Robinson in fiction, and Roz Chast in autobiography.
Photos from left to right: Ross Gay (Jim Krause), Paul Beatty, Maggie Nelson, and Margo Jefferson
Twenty years ago, Scot Rossillo started making rainbow bagels at his bagel store in Brooklyn, New York. In the last few months, with media attention, the popularity of the rainbow bagels has skyrocketed, even resulting in the temporary closure of one of his shops for renovations to keep up with the overwhelming demand. Write a story about a character who has been working on her own creative project for years—toiling in relative obscurity—and suddenly becomes an overnight sensation. How does she handle the increase in attention and demand for her work? What kind of new and unforeseen pressures might create conflict for her, and what kind of sacrifices is she willing—or not willing—to make?
"What's very odd is the difference between the dream world of the United States and the reality." In a conversation at the Center for Fiction in 2012, Irish novelists Belinda McKeon and Colm Tóibín discuss the struggles and triumphs that come with writing while traveling between Ireland and the United States.
Oxford Magazine, Miami University Press
"Number 1: Don't write what you know. Start with what you don't know, what you don't understand." In her craft talk at the 2012 Colgate Writers' Conference, novelist Dana Spiotta explains how she wrote Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011) in six (not-so-easy) steps. Her new novel, Innocents and Others (Scribner, 2016), explores a friendship between two female filmmakers.
"I'm a graphomaniac!" Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk talks about his love of writing for the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club. His newest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind (Knopf, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
“I was fascinated by the tales of my grandmother...it was enough for me. I didn’t need any books.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburō Ōe discusses his life and work in an interview with UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler in 1999. His latest novel, Death by Water (Grove Press, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
National Book Foundation’s new executive director Lisa Lucas talks publishing and diversity; the politics behind dictionaries; the Tournament of Books kicks off; and other news.
"The world is always a little bit slippery and strange, and what we think of as real is something that's always contingent in some way." Brian Evenson, author of the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016), talks about dreams, truth versus fiction, the strangeness of horses, and psychoanalysis before a reading at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.
