Tag: literary awards

Eavesdropping: National Book Foundation E-News

March 24th, 2010

Somehow, without even being sure how, self finds herself getting regular e-news from the National Book Foundation. Since no one self knows ever wins the Award, she usually doesn’t pay any attention to these missives (Except, didn’t D.A. Powell just win it in poetry? Self knows D.A. Powell, for sure! She even took him to Higuma, small neighborhood Japanese restaurant in good ol’ RWC!).

Ah, well, yes: back to the latest news on past National Book Award winners. After reading the news, self is more than ever convinced that when you finally succeed in cracking the glass ceiling of one of these prestigious Awards, you will never ever stop getting more Awards: they will all start tumbling into your lap, like a neat pile of dominoes.

Without further ado:

Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose In Other Rooms, Other Wonders received The Story Prize, was also the recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and is a finalist for the Commonwealth Best First Book Prize.

Rae Armantrout, 2009 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Versed.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, a 2006 finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, was adapted for the big screen as the film “Green Zone,” starring Matt Damon.

Natalie Angier, a finalist in 1999 for Woman: An Intimate Geography, is a nonfiction writer and science journalist for the New York Times. She is currently serving a six-year appointment (2006 – 2012) as an A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, a post previously held by National Book Award authors Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Perusing THE ECONOMIST’S Best Books of the Year 2009

January 4th, 2010
Books self is interested in reading after perusing The Economist’s Books of the Year 2009:

Politics and Current Affairs
- It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong, a “down-to-earth yet sophisticated exposé of how an entire country can be munched in the clammy claws of corruption and tribalism”
Biography and memoirs
- The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, about “one of the finest short-story stylists Britain has ever produced”
- Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, by Martin Gayford, about how “John Constable, disapproved of by his wife’s relatives, his own family and his painting peers, was buoyed by the support of his wife, Maria Bicknell, and triumphed in the end”
- William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey, “the first authorised biography”
History
- Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game, by Paul Midler, a “useful analysis by a consultant who advises Western companies on what to do about China’s manufacturing problems”
Science and technology
- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, a “persuasive analysis of the evolutionary role of cookery”
Culture and society
- A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter, a blend of “academic respect and robust judgment with humour and a common touch”
- The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929 – 1940, “letters from Samuel Beckett’s most prolific decade”
- Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir, by Rick Gekoski, “a roly-poly book dealer with a passion for Groucho Marx’s motto: Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.“
Fiction
- Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, “a deserved winner of the Man Booker prize”
- Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro, “the Canadian winner of the 2009 Man Booker International prize”
- Love and Summer, by William Trevor, “an elegant collection”
- The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, “a novelist who has an inquisitive, and quite un-English, interest in history and science”
- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer, “this is by far his best”
- Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell, by Javier Marias, transl. by Margaret Jull Costa, a spy thriller that is also “a novel of ideas”
- In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin, “a remarkable debut”
- The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels, a novel “of violence, death and bereavement, and about survivors who are also mourners”
Your Application Was Given Thoughtful and Thorough Attention (Or: Welcome to Self’s Pity Party)

November 2nd, 2009
Self is at the moment watching Animal Planet, a program on crocodiles, featuring plenty of close-ups of the endangered animals. Their great green eyes are round and unblinking and remind self of emeralds.

Self got the rejection letter from the National Endowment for the Arts in the mail today.

For a hot second, self contemplated taking the “high road.”

But only for a hot second. Self then spent the rest of the (gorgeous) afternoon thinking dark and ruinous thoughts. To wit:
- It was such a bear getting that application together, she had to download all kinds of software! She missed the deadline two years ago because she couldn’t figure out the instructions! Then spent the next two years plotting her application strategy! Which, as readers of the above lines already know, led to today’s unfortunate result!
- Self starts to think: some awardees will assuredly be first-time novelists or first-time published people! Hello, the old guard is passing on, and with them self, and let’s make way for the new! Might as well take self out with the trash! The middle-aged trash, that is! (As if the (more…)
Here’s the Thing

October 13th, 2009

Yesterday was quite an amazing day as self got the absolutely amazing news that a story of hers was a finalist in a flash fiction contest. Self’s been trying for years to get into this journal, with no luck. And now she’s a finalist?

The prize was $500.

Unfortunately or perhaps just unluckily, the story was “Appetites,” which is in the current issue (# 31) of cool website Cafe Irreal.

Alas! She had so little faith in her chances (or is perhaps too much a creature of impulse) that, yes indeed, amazing as it may seem, she submitted the exact same piece to the contest and to Cafe Irreal, which published it. (Then again, dear blog readers, what are the odds? Of you becoming a finalist in a contest? Given the fact that there are hundreds of writers equally or perhaps more talented than you, all of them also submitting to contests? Isn’t becoming a contest finalist then akin to the rich man going through the eye of a needle, or whatever analogy the Bible used to illustrate the difficulty of getting into heaven?)

Self had to withdraw from the contest, today.

Here are a couple of thoughts that presented to self:

There is always a first time for everything. So now self has the unique honor of knowing how it feels to have to excuse herself from a contest in which she has become (quite improbably) a finalist.

Also: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Hopefully?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
Gemino “Jimmy” Abad: “Parable of Stones”

September 24th, 2009

The August 2009 issue of Filipinas Magazine contains an article by Yvette Tan on the (more…)
Sometimes You Even Win

September 1st, 2009
Self just got the news like, 10 minutes ago: she’d been rather half-heartedly reading her e-mail when she saw the message from the Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C. Mayor of the Roses was selected with seven other books to be featured in the Writer’s Center Spring 2010 reading series.

Here are the other fellows:
- Anthony (more…)
Is This For Real?

July 15th, 2009

Self received the e-mail a couple of days ago, but didn’t have a chance to read it (what with self’s younger beagle suffering from snail bait poisoning — !!!) until this evening. And here’s what she read:

. . . on September 21st, you will have a chance to select The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction and win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards by visiting the Foundation’s web site at http://www.nationalbook.org, the first time in its history the Awards will open to a public vote.

!!@@##

Here’s the rest of the announcement:

To celebrate (more…)
Self Wishes to Comment on the 2008 Winners of the AWP Award Series

November 4th, 2008

Self is at home, trying to catch a little shut-eye before her 6 p.m. class. Last night, because she took too long preparing her course materials, she ended up passing the Rubicon of midnight, and then the Rubicon of 2 a.m., and then the hell of 3:30 a.m., and then the absolute misery of 6 a.m. having had only (as far as she can calculate) only an hour’s sleep. And then she had to get up, get dressed, wash her face, comb her hair, head out into the cold and drizzly day (which is manna for her plants, though, self shouldn’t complain), and parade her tremendous eyebags to the world . . .

But anyhoo, self was able to rest on the couch for a few hours after her morning class. For some reason she kept thinking it was 5 o’clock, when it was only 4 o’clock. And she’s mighty confused at that Wolf Blitzer, who’s been standing before a map of the United States all afternoon, spouting poll results as if they were election results (“47% in Indiana for McCain, 47% for Obama, 5% undecided . . . “) To calm down (as the weather is truly awful, and self realized she left her only umbrella in the City last weekend, and she has chosen today of all days to bring her class to Stanford for a reading by Edward P. Jones and already two people have e-mailed her that they are coming down with the flu and cannot make it), self is browsing through the AWP Chronicle. Self will admit that she rarely reads the articles, preferring to go straight to the “meat and potatoes,” i.e., the Awards and Grants section at the back of each issue.

But, on the way there, she lands on a full-page ad for this year’s AWP Award Series (she didn’t apply, out of cowardice) and — Holy Jesus! — doesn’t that Donald Hall Prize-winner in Poetry look like the spitting image of Anne Heche? And the winner of the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction looks like a really young, possibly “ethnic” version of Natasha McElhone (of “Californication”), not to mention that her name — Ramola D — definitely has that je na sais quois of intangible mystery, and the winner in Creative Nonfiction looks like she still has baby fat, for gosh sakes, and just when self is ready to gnash her teeth in endless frustration, she stops dead, just stops dead, all her nerve endings arrested by this one line in the bio of Goldie Goldbloom (Now there’s a writerly name, if ever there was one!), winner of the AWP Award Series in the Novel, that says, simply:

She lives in Chicago and has eight children.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
Dark Thoughts (Inspired by Announcement of “Five Under 35” Award from National Book Foundation)

September 24th, 2008
Self has struggled more than half her life to “make it” as a writer, and now comes the announcement of the “next generation,” from the National Book Foundation.
Truly, the guy (Filipino) who told self in Berlin, three years ago, “If you haven’t made it by now, you’re never going to make it” was right (if only it had not taken self three years to realize full import. But, once again, I digress)

Well, self could say, I did have my first book out when I was 33.

Yeah, (voice in her head says) but what have you done since then? One other book and an anthology. Pathetic.

So, move aside, self! Without further ado, the next generation of under-35 writers, newly annointed by the National Book Foundation:
Why can’t they have a category for over-40 writers? Or over-50 writers? Or for writers who have made it to middle age without giving up? Surely writers in the last group deserve some kind of recognition for their dogged tenacity? How about something for writers who-are-soon-to-be-no-longer-with-us? Oops, self forgot. The latter category already exists: it’s the Nobel.

Self, what is up with you today? Can you not just quit your everlasting whining?

Here are some award categories self would like the National Book Foundation to consider:

Awards for Writers with the Most “Chutzpah” and/or Tenacity (for writers who have reached a certain age and are still writing, without benefit of encouragement from any publishers whatsoever)

Awards for Writers Most In Need of a Massage (for writers who have incurred carpal tunnel syndrome, back problems, and other disabilites incurred during selfless pursuit of their avocation)

Awards for Writers Who Took the Longest Time Between Their First and Second Books (Self believes she actually might have a crack at this one, for her gap was 14 years)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.