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For eight years readers have anticipated Nathan Englander’s follow-up to his wildly successful debut story collection. With the publication of The Ministry of Special Cases, the wait is over.
Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin). Also nominated were Martín Espada for The Republic of Poetry (Norton) and David Wojahn for Interrogation Palace: New & Selected Poems 1982-2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press).
Ian McEwan, whose eleventh novel, On Chesil Beach, is forthcoming in June, recently agreed to return a handful of pebbles that he had unwittingly stolen from a protected beach in southwest England. McEwan admitted to taking the pebbles from Chesil Beach during a promotional interview for his new book. The beach, which is part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, is protected; removing pebbles is illegal and can result in a fine.
This year’s annual Story Prize ceremony, held on Wednesday, February 28, at the New School’s Tishman auditorium in New York City, marked the award’s third year and an evening that is fast becoming an established literary event.
The late Norman Mailer was awarded yesterday the fifteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a passage in his last novel The Castle in the Forest (Random House, 2007). The award was established in 1993 by the London magazine the Literary Review "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
Earlier this month Chronicle Books published Severance, a book of extremely short stories, each told from the point of view of a person who has been decapitated. Nicole Brown Simpson, John the Baptist, and Cicero are among the narrators. But Severance isn’t the work of some drooling, maniacal scribbler. In fact, the author, Robert Olen Butler, has published over a dozen books of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992).
