Our own Emily St. John Mandel won one of the inaugural Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards yesterday for her novel The Singer’s Gun. The other honorees for this award, which was voted on by indie booksellers around the country, were Paolo Bacigalupi for The Windup Girl, Adam Levin for The Instructions, Karl Marlantes for Matterhorn, and Nina Revoyr for Wingshooters.
Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards
“describe this flight / and not add a last line.”
“All poems of public grief are private poems first,” writes Mark Doty in his evaluation of Wisława Szymborska’s poem, “Photograph from September 11th.” Indeed, what Doty learned “over the course of those dozen years, was that the words one hammers out in private, in order to attempt some kind of sense, may end up being used by people in ways you could have never anticipated.”
ROOSTER!
Did you forget that The Morning News Tournament of Books starts today? If so, I bet you're glad you saw this reminder. Have fun.
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Presidential Fan Mail
Jacket Copy gets some presidential fan mail. Plus, find out what said president has been reading lately.
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Since You Asked
Recommended Reading: On terrible writing advice from famous writers.
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Dmitry Samarov on Writers No One Reads
Hack author Dmitry Samarov is this week’s guest blogger at Writers No One Reads (which we’ve mentioned before). In his first post, Samarov takes a look at the work of Willard Motley, who grew up in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in the early 1900s, and is most well-known for his 1947 bestseller, Knock On Any Door.
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Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Writer Manjula Martin has been a stock girl, used bookseller, seamstress, waitress, retailer, Girl Friday- just to name a few of her day jobs. She questions the value of the artist’s day job in her VQR post. “Why are writers so eager to leave work behind?” she writes.
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