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
Facts and Feelings
“Historical fiction was not—and is not—meant to supplant literature from the period it describes.” Year in Reading alumnus Alexander Chee on historical novels and creative liberties.
Write Across America
The folks at Write By Night are embarking on a quest to organize State Writing Resources (“from conferences to local critique groups to literary magazines”) for all fifty states in our nation. The first two destinations on the docket? Alabama and Alaska, respectively.
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And Thus Completes Our Robert A. Caro Coverage
Even if you read and watch all of these pieces about Robert A. Caro, it’ll still amount to only a fraction of the time necessary to read one of his books. So here goes: a typical Sunday for Mr. Caro; not one but two fake Caro Twitter accounts (plus a real one); Mr. Caro stops by The Daily Show; and The Passage of Power gets reviewed by us, NPR, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal.
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An Interview with Justin Taylor
Writers who know literature: Bookslut’s Mark Doten talks Kierkegaard, Derrida, Bataille, Sinclair and Faulkner with Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever author Justin Taylor.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ulitskaya; Moody; Cunningham; Parker; Hawke
Out this week: The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya; Hotels of North America by Rick Moody; A Wild Swan: And Other Tales by Michael Cunningham; Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker; and Rules for a Knight by the actor Ethan Hawke. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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In a Room of the Auction House
“It can not be that I monopolize / The making of the songs that give you praise / Or that such pools as are your dearest eyes / Have just one bather through the unclear days. / Then, let me take my place amid the pack, / If I so pack my songs with your rare worth / There were no quality they then should lack / But they were bettered by that happy death.” A previously unpublished Ezra Pound sonnet selling at auction is always newsworthy–especially when it fetches nearly $12,000. Here is a related Millions piece about the difficult poetry of Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and Ted Berrigan.
Truly the Best Contest Ever
The New Yorker Book Bench is having a contest. Submit a photo of your pet dressed as a character from literature. My kittens are in for the worst two weeks of their young lives. Dante and Fur-gil? Tess of the O’Paw-bervilles? Jay Catsby?
Oh my god. So many possibilities.