Jump to navigation Skip to content
Books by James Comey and John Oliver vie for top spot on Amazon’s best-seller list; finalists for Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award announced; novelist Alex George will open a bookstore in Columbia, Missouri; and other news.
“I own no dog, but I am about to let go of the leash.” Shayla Lawson, author of I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018), reads her poem “Pantone 427 U” for the Spoken Series at the Pickathon music festival in Portland, Oregon.
In a 2013 interview for the National Book Foundation, poet Lucie Brock-Broido, who passed away earlier this month, spoke of a leather-bound journal she kept with lists of names and titles. “Sometimes, I just place a title at the top of the undisturbed, blank page and that name becomes something like a piece of sand that happened into the delicate flesh of an oyster, blank itself and closed off from the world…. The result, eventually, is a pearl.” Spend several days jotting down phrases and combinations of words you come across, either out in the world or from your imagination, that seem particularly imagistic, evocative, or disquieting. Select one to use as a poem title, and then let a poem build intuitively, layer by layer, around the “disturbance.”
Submissions are currently open for the 2018 Not Otherwise Specified (NOS) Book Contest. A prize of $1,000 and publication by Les Figues Press will be given annually for a book of poetry or prose that “exceeds genre conventions.” Poet Simone White will judge.
Accepted entries include poetry collections, novellas, novels, story collections, essays, hybrid works, and translations. Using the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 64 to 250 pages with a $25 entry fee (which includes a book of choice from the Les Figues catalogue) by April 1.
An imprint of the Los Angeles Review of Books’s LARB Books, Les Figues Press publishes feminist poetry, prose, visual art, and translation. Previous winners of the NOS award include Mariko Nagai for Irradiated Cities and Adam Tipps Weinstein for Some Versions of the Ice. Visit the Les Figues website for more information.
A reading of Rachel Carson’s writing on the sea; the finalists for the $10,000 Four Quartets Poetry Prize; candles inspired by books; and other news.
Judges for 2018 National Book Awards announced; women writers share the books they read when they’re angry; novelist Katherine Faw on her writing process; and other news.
Last night in New York City the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards (NBCC) were announced. The winners in all six categories were women, including Layli Long Soldier in poetry for her collection, WHEREAS (Graywolf), Joan Silber in fiction for her novel Improvement (Counterpoint), and Xiaolu Guo in autobiography for her memoir, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove).
The poetry finalists were Nuar Alsadir’s Fourth Person Singular (Oxford University Press), James Longenbach’s Earthling (W.W. Norton), Frank Ormsby’s The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press), and Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Zephyr Press).
The finalists in fiction were Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Riverhead), Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf), and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner).
The finalists in autobiography were Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Abrams), Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper), Henry Marsh’s Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins), and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, translated from the Russian by Anna Summers (Penguin).
Additionally, fiction writer Carmen Maria Machado won the John Leonard Prize for her story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf); fiction writer and critic Charles Finch received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; and creative nonfiction writer John McPhee received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
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 magazine and newspaper critics and editors nominates and selects the winners each year. Visit the NBCC website for a complete list of winners and finalists.
(Photos from left: Layli Long Soldier, Joan Silber, Xiaolu Guo)
This expansion store of McNally Jackson Books located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a two-story space with a large selection of literature and a robust children’s book section. The shop also hosts readings, talks, and panels across a range of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
PowerHouse on 8th is a bookstore, reading club, mini-gallery, and community space in the South Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, offering the best in fiction, nonfiction, children’s, YA, novelty, and cooking books, as well as decor and stationery—all from the curatorial minds hived at Dumbo’s famed powerHouse Arena. The shop hosts book launches, readings, and a Sunday Story Time series.
Craigardan offers two-week to one-month residencies year-round to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers at Craigardan, a nonprofit arts and agricultural academic center in Keene, located on Hurricane Mountain in the Adirondack region of New York. The resident will receive lodging in a private cabin or shared farmhouse with a shared kitchen and bath. Craigardan accommodates one writer at a time. The cost of the residency, which includes some meals, is $250 per week or $1,000 per month.
Craigardan Writer's Residency, P.O. Box 46, Keene, NY 12942. (518) 242-6535. Michele Drozd, Executive Director
