September 22, 2015
Each year the American Library Association awards one work of fiction and one work of nonfiction an Andrew Carnegie Medal. This year the longlists of both categories have been announced. Where are your gaps? Want to fill them? Then just click on the titles below and reserve your copies with EPL today! Continue reading “Andrew Carnegie Medals announced!”
September 2, 2014
Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the top vote for most influential book written by women. A selection of 20 titles voted by the public was launched 
to find novels by women “that have most impacted, shaped or changed readers’ lives”. Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti described Ms. Lee’s novel as “the book that introduced many of us to our belief in human rights,” adding “with human rights under attack the world over, the enduring appeal of Harper Lee’s great tale gives hope that justice and equality might yet triumph over prejudice”. Other titles on the list include classics, science fiction, romance and children’s literature. Read the full article in The Guardian and check out the entire list here.
Laura
August 18, 2014
American author Ann Leckie is the recipient of this year’s Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor, for her debut novel Ancillary Justice. Ms. Leckie’s book, “narrated by the artificial consciousness of a starship”, has won other major sci-fi awards, including the Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards and the British Science Fiction Association award. NPR’s Genevieve Valentine wrote: “Ancillary Justice is an absorbing thousand-year history, a poignant personal journey, and a welcome addition to the genre.” The Hugo award is named after Hugo Gernsback who founded the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and coined the word science fiction. Other winners of this year’s award include Equoid by Charles Stross and The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu. You can read more about this prestigious award and see the full list of winners here.
Laura
August 1, 2014
Diaries and notebooks of poet Siegfried Sassoon will be published online by the Cambridge University Library. The 23 diaries and two journals are being made public to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of World War I. Writing in a “leather-bound notebook from a fly-speck village in northern France” Sassoon wrote “My inner life is far more real than the hideous realism of this land, the war -zone.” Cambridge University librarian Anne Jarvis calls the archive “a collection of towering importance, not just to historians, but to anyone seeking to understand the horror, bravery and futility of the First World War as experienced by those on the front lines and in the trenches.” Read more in these articles from the NYT and NPR. And check the EPL catalog for works by and about this celebrated war poet.
Laura
July 30, 2014
Winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards were announced today by the PEN/American Center. Among the winners are poet Frank Bidart for his collection Metaphysical Dog (also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award); critic James Wolcott for Critical Mass (reviewed as “epic and epically rewarding”) and playwright David Rabe. Other winners include Linda Leavell for biography, Carl Hart for literary science and Ron Childress for socially engaged fiction (a prize founded by Barbara Kingsolver). The $25,000 award for Debut Fiction will be announced at the end of September. Read more about the awards in this NYT article.
Laura
July 23, 2014
This year is the first time the Man Booker Prize, United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award is celebrating authors of literary fiction “whether from Chicago, Sheffield or Shanghai.” Four American authors and one Irish-American writer are among the 13 finalists: Joshua Ferris for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour; Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; Siri Hustvedt for The Blazing World; Richard Powers for Orfeo and Joseph O’Neill for The Dog. Other nominees include: Richard Flanagan (Australia), Howard Jacobson (Britain), Paul Kingsnorth (Britain), David Mitchell (Britain), Neel Mukherjee (Britain), David Nicholls (Britain), Ali Smith (Britain), Niall Williams (Ireland). The winner who will receive 50,000 pounds (about $85,000) will be announced in October. Read more in these articles from the NYT and NPR.
Laura
July 15, 2014
Scribner will be releasing a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises in late July. The classic book begins with the line “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” But the original opening began: “This is a novel about a lady.” The new edition with the discarded first chapter and alternate drafts and titles also includes Hemingway’s 1923 essay of his first visit to the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain. For more about the reissuing of this classic, see the NYT article. And check out the EPL catalog for Hemingway’s other works.
Laura
July 14, 2014
South African writer Nadine Gordimer died today in Johannesburg at the age of 90. Known for her writings dealing with themes of injustice and cruelty in apartheid South Africa, Ms. Gordimer wrote more than two dozen works of fiction as well as essays and literary criticism. Three of her books were banned in her country – her second novel A World of Strangers (1958), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), and Burger’s Daughter (1979). In 1974 she on the Booker Prize for The Conservationist and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. She said it wasn’t her country’s problems that started her writing. “On the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.” She continued writing after apartheid, saying “it wasn’t apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn’t the end of apartheid that’s going to stop me.” Read the entire NYT article here and check the EPL catalog for works by this acclaimed author.
Laura
July 1, 2014
The Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction was awarded to Donna Tartt for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch. The award for nonfiction went to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for The Bully Pulpit. The medals were presented at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas on Saturday. Each winner receives a $5,000 cash prize. Commenting on the importance of libraries during her childhood, Ms. Tartt said: “you can really change someone’s life by giving them the right book at the right time. All writers are readers before we write a word, so there’s a kinship and it’s very deep.” Ms. Goodwin also has fond memories of borrowing books from her childhood library, recalling how “libraries have been second homes for her throughout her career.” Other finalists for the medal were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Edwige Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light for fiction, and Nicholas A. Basbanes’ On Paper and Sherri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial for nonfiction. Read more in this Seattle Times article.
Laura
June 20, 2014
The 2014 PEN Pinter prize is being awarded to Salman Rushdie. Named in memory of playwright Harold Pinter, the award is given annually to a
British writer who has an “unflinching, unswerving” and “fierce intellectual determination…to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” Head judge Maureen Freely said: This prize is English PEN”s way of thanking Salman Rushdie not just for his books and his many years of speaking out for freedom of expression, but also for his countless private acts of kindness. When he sees writers unjustly vilified, prosecuted or forced into exile, he takes a personal interest.” Read more in today’s Guardian and NPR articles. And check the EPL catalog for works by this author.
Laura
