Edith Pearlman takes the 2011 PEN/Malamud award in recognition of her short stories. Her most recent collection, her fourth, is Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories.
2011 PEN/Malamud Winner
Lit on YouTube
For Electric Literature Jennifer Baker interviews Yahdon Israel who hosts the weekly literary interview series LIT on Youtube. On his inspiration for starting the show; "I watch a great deal of interviews on the Breakfast Club, James Lipton’s Inside the Actors Studio, Sway in the Morning, Hot 97, Between Two Ferns. And the people who are seldom interviewed are writers. In many ways being Black has taught me to notice what isn’t there. That lens lends itself to what I notice about pop culture: We’re missing from the conversation. Better put: We’re not included. And by “we” I mean writers." Watch the show and subscribe, some interviews include Kaitlyn Greenidge, Claire Messaud, Victor LaValle and Jesmyn Ward.
What to Expect
Chief among your more anxiety-producing kinds of literature is the genre of books geared towards expectant mothers. Examples of the genre offer every bit of advice imaginable -- much of it contradictory -- and condemn a laundry list of relatively common behaviors. At Salon, our own Lydia Kiesling recounts her own dive into the pregnancy-lit waters. This might also be a good time to read fellow staff writer Edan Lepucki on the perils of reading while expecting.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Check out some of the good stuff floating around:A bookstore on a boat at The CS MonitorSimilarties between David Mitchell's Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas at Conversational Reading.Tingle Alley discovers that Zadie Smith's hubby Nick Laird may be getting preferential treatment in the book pages.Aelfred of Dunwoody Recalls a Viking Incursion at Wal-Mart, 848 AD. You can't really beat this.
“What they are, what they should be”
A New Struggle
A new, annotated edition of Mein Kampf is slated for release sometime next week, and it's already poised to be a bestseller in Germany. The edition, which aims to "unmask his false allegations, whitewashing and outright lies," will debut at number 20 on the bestseller list after increased demand bumped the initial print run up to 15,000 copies.