The Believer, the monthly whose mission, in part, is to "focus on writers and books we like," has named its finalists for the 2011 Believer Book Award for fiction. Of the five books selected by the magazine's editors as the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year," four are published by small, independent presses.

The shortlisted titles are Jesse Ball's third novel, The Curfew (Vintage), which the Believer's editors describe as "a tortuous snake of a story" that winds up resembling "an ouroboros swallowing its own tail"; Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (New Directions), a novel "preoccupied with the question of what genius looks like"; Lars Iyer's novel debut, Spurious (Melville House), whose pleasures are evocative of Beckett; Widow (Bellevue Literary Press), the first short story collection from novelist Michelle Latiolais, whose "narrators navigate familiar landscapes rendered nearly impassable by grief"; and Ben Lerner, who has previously published three poetry collections, for his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press).

The winner of the Believer Book Award will be announced in the May 2012 issue. Readers' nominations for best books of 2011 will appear alongside prize announcement.

In the video below, the Center for Fiction and n+1 magazine present a dramatic reading from DeWitt's shortlisted third novel (the second segment of the two-part reading is here).

Shenandoah, the literary journal published by Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has doubled the prize purse for its second annual short short story contest—which still has no entry fee.

The Bevel Summers Prize, which received over two hundred submissions in its inaugural year, now offers a five-hundred-dollar award, and the winner will also see her miniature fiction published in Shenandoah.

The judge will be fiction writer Chris Galaver, an assistant professor at Washington and Lee. Galaver is the author of the novel-in-stories School for Tricksters, published last month by Southern Methodist University Press.

Writers may submit up to three stories of no more than one thousand words each by March 31. The winner will be announced in June. For complete guidelines, visit the magazine's prize page online.

Some details of the legacy late Polish poet Wisława Szymborska hoped to leave writers of the future were revealed yesterday at the opening of her will in Krakow. According to Michal Rusinek, Szymborska's personal secretary, the Nobel Prize-winning poet had called for the establishment of a foundation, among the tasks of which would be to facilitate the creation of a new literary prize.

The nature of the prize was not illustrated in Szymborska's will. The foundation, which will assume care of Szymborska's papers and possessions, will be responsible for determining the type of prize and to whom it might be given.

Szymborska, whose last collection, Here (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was published in the United States in 2010, died on the first of this month at the age of eighty-eight.

The video below is an animated adaptation of Szymborska's poem "Advertisement," translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanaugh.