The very first entry on this blog featured a book titled American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland (Gotham Books, $26) — a book that appealed to the former Midwestern band geek in me.
Good news! The book's author, Kristen Laine, recently was awarded the L.L. Winship/PEN New England award for nonfiction. The award is given annually to books written by New England authors and/or books on New England topics. While the book is all about Midwestern teenagers, Laine lives in New Hampshire, which allowed her to qualify for the prize. (For a list of all the winners, check out the PEN New England Web site).
Author Kristen Laine
Last year's Winship winner in the nonfiction category was Sebastian Junger for A Death in Belmont.
To learn more about American Band and read more reviews, visit Laine's Web site. The paperback comes out in September.
Chicago-based author Jon Lellenberg, along with his co-authors Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, was recently nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for a 2008 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical category for Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (Penguin Press, $37.95)
Publisher's Weekly had this to say: "This fascinating collection of previously unpublished letters from the creator of Sherlock Holmes offers a revealing glimpse of a Renaissance man fated to be overshadowed by his most famous character. Beginning with correspondence from Doyle as an eight-year-old in 1867, the editors offer a warts-and-all picture of his life until 1920, 10 years before his death, covering the author's frank accounts of life at a boarding school, his struggles as a young doctor and aspiring writer, and his political advocacy. This will be essential reading for all fans of Conan Doyle and his sleuth."
The Edgar Awards —named after Edgar Allan Poe, of course — "are considered the Oscars of the mystery genre." The award ceremony will take place May 1 in New York. For more information: www.theedgars.com.
NEW YORK (AP) — A novel about a young girl’s affinity for Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and an exploration of life in and near the water in the South Pacific are this year’s winners of the 12th annual Kiriyama Prize.
The award is given for ‘‘literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.’’
New Zealand author Lloyd Jones was honored in fiction for Mister Pip, in which a student on a war-torn South Pacific island escapes in her mind to Dickens’ 19th century London. The nonfiction prize went to Julia Whitty’s The Fragile Edge, a report on people who live by the water in the South Pacific and a celebration of the water itself.
Jones and Whitty each will receive $30,000.
The Kiriyama is sponsored by the nonprofit Pacific Rim Voices. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry.
I can't tell you how thrilled I was to learn that there's an award out there for the Oddest Book Title. Who knew? I did not, but it kind of goes along with my Book of the Day idea that whatever catches my eye might get featured on this blog.
The 2007 Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year goes to: If you Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start WIth Your Legs.
"The winner makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes,’’ said Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, a British magazine. ‘‘So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself.’’
The author, Big Boom (no kidding, that's the author) calls it a ‘‘self-help book, written by a man for the benefit of women.’’ It’s a book, he writes, that is ‘‘raw, honest and about you,’’ distilling ‘‘the sweat off my back, the wrinkles in my forehead from anger and thinking all the time.’’
Second and third place, respectively, went to I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen and Cheese Problems Solved. (I might mention here that neither these titles nor the winning title came through my Book Room. If they had, they most certainly would have warranted their own blog entries.)
Past winners include: Weeds in a Changing World (1999), The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (2003); Bombproof Your Horse (2004); and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (2006).
NEW YORK (AP) — Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, a novel about a celebrated painter and the three essential women in his life, has won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced Wednesday.
Kate Christensen
Christensen, author of three previous novels, will receive $15,000. The four other finalists, each of whom will receive $5,000, are: Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, T.M. McNally’s The Gateway and Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories.
Previous winners of the award, established in 1980, include Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit organization ‘‘committed to building audiences for exceptional literature and bringing writers together with their readers.’’
NEW YORK — Stories from the island of Hispaniola were winners Thursday night at the National Book Critics Circle awards: Dominican-American Junot Diaz took the fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Edwidge Danticat of Haiti was cited in autobiography for Brother, I’m Dying.
The general nonfiction prize went to Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid, while the winner in biography was Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. The poetry award went to Mary Jo Bang for Elegy, and the criticism winner was Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise.
Winning authors (from left): Tim Jeal, Mary Jo Bang, Alex Ross, Edwidge
Danticat , Emilie Buchwald, Sam Anderson, and Harriet Washington.
Not pictured is Junot Diaz. (Seth Wenig~AP)
Diaz, whose novel tells of a young, obese Dominican immigrant and his tragicomic quest for love, was on his way to Venezuela on Thursday night for personal reasons and his award was accepted by Sean McDonald of Riverhead Books. He joked that ‘‘some distinct shouting’’ could probably be heard all the way from Caracas, or at least the muffled sounds of ‘‘the vestigial part of his brain being blown.’’
Danticat — known for such fiction as The Dew Breaker and Krik? Krak! — said she was a bit out of place in nonfiction, telling her fellow finalists that ‘‘I feel like I’m visiting your category’’ and promising ‘‘to speak well of this world’’ when she got back to writing fiction.
Jeal spoke of the many years working on his book about the famed explorer Henry Stanley, a process he described as ‘‘mammoth’’ and ‘‘irksome.’’
Bang offered a more personal memory. She recalled a sixth-grade play in which she was to portray the season of spring and ‘‘slink across the stage in diaphanous scarves.’’ The play was canceled after a parent protested, thinking Bang would only be wearing scarves. So, on Thursday, she thanked the critics for ‘‘restoring my moment on stage.’’
Two honorary awards also were presented. Literary critic Sam Anderson of New York magazine received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Emilie Buchwald, co-founder of the Milkweed Editions publishing house, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award.
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, has about 500 members. There were no cash prizes.
Barnes & Noble has announced that Kate Braestrup's memoir, Here If You Need Me, and Joshua Ferris' debut novel, Then We Came to the End — both published by Little, Brown — are the winners of the 15th annual Discover Great New Writers Awards. Each author will receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising support.
Publisher's Weekly gave starred reviews to both books.
On Braestrup's: "It may take ingenuity to interest browsers in a memoir by a middle-aged mother who, 11 years ago, was suddenly widowed, then became a Unitarian-Universalist minister, and now works as chaplain to game wardens in Maine. But good memoir writing does not depend on celebrity or adventure ... and Braestrup's insightful essays are extraordinarily well written, mingling elements of police procedural and touching love story with trenchant observations about life and death."
On Ferris': "At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression."
Second place winners ($5,000 each): Elizabeth Samet for Soldier's Heart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Matthew Eck for The Farther Show (Milkweed Editions).
Third place ($2,500 each): Yaroslav Trofimov for The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday); Vendela Vida for Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco).
Note: Chicago writer and former Sun-Timesman Robert Kurson (Shadow Divers and Crashing Through) served on this year's nonfiction jury panel.
NEW YORK (AP) — Poet Tom Sleigh’s Space Walk has been named this year’s winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a $100,000 prize given to someone "who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of his or her career."
Janice N. Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, a debut collection, received the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Administered by Claremont Graduate University, based in Claremont, Calif., the awards were established in the early 1990s by Kate Tufts in honor of her late husband, poet Kingsley Tufts. Previous winners include Alan Shapiro, Carl Phillips and Michael Ryan.
NEW YORK (AP) — A biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee and a book about the relationship between President Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass were this year’s winners of the Lincoln Prize for Civil War scholarship.
James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, each will receive $20,000.
‘‘James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor have made major contributions to our understanding of leaders who — by their writing, political leadership, and military genius, and by either their capacity for, or resistance to, change — altered the way America regards both itself and its people,’’ Lincoln Prize founders Richard Gilman and Lewis Lehrman said in a statement Tuesday, Lincoln’s 199th birthday.
Previous winners of the award, founded in 1990, include Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln.
LONDON (AP) — Scottish writer and standup comedian A.L. Kennedy has won Britain’s Costa Book of the Year Award for her novel about a World War II veteran whose work as an extra on a war film forces him to confront his past.
Kennedy, 42, will receive $50,000 for her novel Day (Knopf, 288 pages, $24), which the chair of the judging panel, author Joanna Trollope, called ‘‘perfectly, beautifully written.’’
‘‘[It’s] very witty, very lyrical, it’s quite dark,’’ Trollope said this week. ‘‘Her style is arresting. There’s a shadow of James Joyce in it.’’
The American Library Association announced its annual awards for children's books while meeting in Philadelphia this week.
Baltimore librarian Laura Amy Schlitz has won this year's John Newbery Medal for best children's book for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick, 96 pages, $19.99).
The book began as a project Schlitz worked on with fifth-graders studying the Middle Ages in the early '90s...
