Inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize Announced

The annual MacArthur "Genius" Fellows were named today. This award gives people from diverse fields $500,000 with "no strings attached," for "exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances." There are typically a handful of literary types among the scientists, artists, and musicians who become Fellows, with this year being no exception. George Saunders is probably the best known among them, but I've listed all of the literary winners below along with some relevant links:David Carroll - Naturalist Author/Illustrator - From the bio on his site: "David is an active lecturer and turtles/wetlands preservation advocate. His art and writing, as well as his extensive fieldwork with turtles and wetlands has been widely recognized, and been the subject of many feature articles." He is the author of a recently published memoir, Self-Portrait with Turtles and "the wet sneaker trilogy" of The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections, and Swampwalker's Journal.Atul Gawande is a prominent surgeon, but he is better known for his book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and his articles in the New Yorker, including "The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?", "Piecework: Medicine's money problem," and many others. In my opinion, Gawande's best quality is his ability to bring his perspective as a surgeon to his stories. Nearly all of his articles start with an observation he has made on the job that he then investigates further. (In this respect, he's not unlike another great medical writer Oliver Sacks.) Other links: A Slate diary Gawande did in 1997; Gawande's 2005 commencement address at Harvard Medical SchoolAdrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family was an incredible work of journalism. To write the book, she spent ten years following the lives of an extended family in the Bronx to paint a detailed portrait of the lives of people that don't get typically get such attention in the press. In an interview with Salon from 2003 (you have to watch an ad to read it), LeBlanc explains what she discovered while writing the book. See also: a recent article by LeBlanc on child actors in the New York Times Magazine, reprinted here.David Macaulay is the illustrator and author behind those incredible "The Way Things Work" books. In them, he deconstructs everyday objects as well as big buildings and other structures in engaging, lighthearted, yet incredibly detailed illustrations. You can see a few of those illustrations here. Macaulay is probably best known for The Way Things Work, but his architectural books, like Mosque are fascinating as well.I can't pretend to know much about Sarah Ruhl - theater is a blind spot for me - so I'll point instead to this long and glowing profile from the Washington Post: "She has been writing and rising steadily ever since, creating plays that aren't easy to categorize. (An anthology of her plays will be published this fall.) The Clean House is tight and funny, skirting the polemics you might expect from a scenario that begins with a demanding WASP doctor and her recalcitrant immigrant maid. Yet it deepens by sly degrees, sweeping the audience on a surprising cloud of feeling as the characters deal with terminal illness in unorthodox ways."George Saunders likely needs little introduction here as he's been a favorite at The Millions and on many other book blogs. He is known for his unique, dystopian yet bleakly funny style that somehow manages to capture everything that is weird about our world without being obvious about it. For more George Saunders fun, check out an interview at Identity Theory, his story "Adams" from the New Yorker (there's more where that came from), or his books, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and In Persuasion Nation.

The big news is that Ian McEwen's On Chesil Beach stays alive. I've heard pretty good things about the book, but I'd guess it's not winning. He's already won one for Amsterdam, and Atonement, considered by most to be his best, didn't win in 2001 (True History of the Kelly Gang took it home that year). For the slight On Chesil Beach to win the prize would seem odd. Clearly, I'm not alone in this thinking, as the bookies, who favored McEwen when the longlist was announced, now favor Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. The longlist was offered here with some excerpts less than a month ago, but since you might not have gotten around to them then, we'll offer the same with the shortlist below.Darkmans by Nicola BarkerThe Gathering by Anne Enright (excerpt)The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (excerpt)Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (excerpt)On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (excerpt)Animal's People by Indra Sinha (excerpt)