From Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, James Joyce's The Dead to Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain—Shakespeare and Company says the novella, a "small but perfectly-formed" literary object, "holds an important place in literature." The Paris bookstore known for its support of aspiring writers recently launched its first Paris Literary Prize to promote the form in contemporary practice.

One writer who has not published a novel, novella, or short story collection will receive an award of ten thousand euros, cosponsored by the recently established de Groot Foundation, and a weekend stay in Paris next June, during which the award will be presented. Two runners-up will also receive a weekend trip to the city of lights.

The deadline for the first three thousand words of a manuscript is December 1, and submissions must be accompanied by an entry fee of fifty euros (approximately sixty-five dollars). Finalists, announced next February, will be asked to submit their complete manuscripts (of twenty- to thirty-thousand words) by March 20, 2011.

Guidelines and more information about how to enter are available on the Paris Literary Prize Web site.

In the video below, the luminous Jean Seberg dances with melancholy in Otto Preminger's film adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), accompanied by the English version of the film's eponymous song.

The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture has named an author the 2010 recipient of the Hiett Prize in Humanities. The fifty-thousand-dollar prize, given to honor a person "whose work in the humanities shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public component related to contemporary culture," goes this year to memoirist, literary journalist, and former whiz kid Mark Oppenheimer.

Currently a visiting professor of creative writing at Wellesley College near Boston, Oppenheimer is the author of the memoir Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, in part a story of his precocious youth in words, published by Free Press in April. He is also the Beliefs columnist for the New York Times, and his essays have appeared in Slate, the New York Times Magazine, the Forward, Details, among other magazines and newspapers. He is preceded as a Hiett Prize recipient by educators and writers in the fields of history, journalism, and ethnic studies.

Application information for the 2011 award will be posted in January. In the meantime, information about the prize and its recipients is available on the Dallas Institute Web site.

In the video below, Oppenheimer talks about one of the themes of his memoir: his early years as a competitive debater.

The National Book Foundation (NBF), sponsors of the National Book Awards, announced yesterday their plans to celebrate Tom Wolfe at this year's awards ceremony. The innovative journalist and novelist who also holds a doctorate in American studies from Yale University will receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters alongside the 2010 National Book Award winners.

Wolfe, responsible for coining popular phrases such as "good ol' boy," "the right stuff," and "the Me Decade," is the author of culturally-keen nonfiction works including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and three novels, I Am Charlotte Simmons, A Man in Full, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. According to NBF executive director Harold Augenbraum, Wolfe's work, along with that of the NBF's 2010 Literarian Award recipient, Sesame Street cocreator Joan Ganz Cooney, "led to enormous changes in our view of the world and took established media in new directions."

The author, who joins a list of past recipients that includes Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and John Updike, will receive the award on November 17.

In the short video below, Wolfe (sans white suit, circa 1970) talks about the expression of language in his native American South with media maven Marshall McLuhan.