Paul Yoon is selected as a Cullman Center Fellow

We are delighted to share the news that Paul Yoon has been selected as a 2015-2016 Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, granting him residence in and invaluable access to the New York Public Library as he pursues a research-oriented project. The Cullman Center encourages a highly collaborate, scholarly, and creative atmosphere, and has been historically awarded to many Prize-winning and prominent authors. Paul was chosen, along with fourteen other Fellows, from a record-high number of applicants.

NYPL President Tony Marx announces in a press release: "It is my honor to welcome a new class of Cullman Center fellows to The New York Public Library. At the Library's iconic Schwarzman Building, these Fellows have a magnificent opportunity to access our world-renowned collections and thrive in an environment that supports their research and inspires creativity. I congratulate the new Fellows and look forward to seeing the unique and creative ways they engage with our collection."

Read the full announcement here.

Akhil Sharma's Family Life wins the Folio Prize

We are thrilled to hear that Akhil Sharma has been awarded the prestigious Folio Prize, designed to honor the year’s best English-language fiction and including a £40,000 check.

The chair of the judges, William Fiennes, praised Family Life as “lucid, compassionate, quietly funny,” adding, “Family Life is a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility. We loved its deceptive simplicity and rare warmth ... This is a work of art that expands with each re-reading and a novel that will endure.”

Andrew Kidd, a co-founder of the prize, also had great things to say: “In this second year of the prize our five judges have again lived up to every expectation, selecting from a glorious shortlist a heartbreaking and funny novel whose astonishing power is achieved in constantly surprising ways.”

Read more.

Sarah Braunstein's short story "All You Have to Do" is featured in this week's New Yorker

"It was 1972 and Sid Baumwell was hungry. For the salt at the bottom of the pretzel dish, for frozen Mars bars, for appreciation from someone who wasn’t a blood relation—preferably a girl with pink cheeks and big sleepy eyes, like the one in “The Graduate,” his second-favorite movie of all time. He could do two dozen pull-ups. No acne. He wasn’t truly handsome but not bad-looking—handsome enough, he felt, to deserve his hunger. Freckles across the bridge of his nose, slightly splayed feet, respectable height. Smart. He knew this. His teachers told him so when they pulled him aside to say that he wasn’t working up to his potential. He had potential, and this mattered more than grades, comforted him more than any A."

Read more.

 

Akhil Sharma's Family Life is shortlisted for the Folio Prize

We’re thrilled to see that Akhil Sharma’s Family Life has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize. 

Announcing the shortlist at the British Library, Chair of Judges William Fiennes, said:

“This shortlist is the result of months of reading and hours of passionate conversation. The eight books we’ve chosen explore vast themes – time, loss, belonging, war, solitude, marriage and family, the making and the mystery of art – with amazing vitality and grace.

“They manage to be both epic and intimate – in fact, they show those dimensions to be two sides of the same coin. They’ve surprised, moved, challenged and enchanted us. They’ve made us laugh. They’ve grown and deepened when we read them again.”

See the full shortlist here.

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The UnAmericans is selected as one of three fiction finalists for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award

Barnes & Noble has revealed the six finalists for its 2014 Discover Great New Writers Awards, and we’re so happy to see that Molly Antopol is one of the three finalists for fiction. The program, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, recognizes great fiction and nonfiction debuts from authors at the start of their careers.

See the full list of finalists here. 

An excerpt from Mark Doten's The Infernal

"DOCUMENT
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OMNOSYNE OUTPUT 1-7 /
ALBERTO GONZALES
[ * ] TRANSLATION [ ] ORIGINAL
[ ] SHOW [ * ] HIDE DISCUSSIONS
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Pushed through committee room door same seat and desk same mic whose sharp black bud was stuck there yet again to coax or spirit or otherwise prize from his lips who knows what putatively incriminating shit for the gathered senators to smear the walls with and point at the walls and send a photo of the walls back home to the ravening over-it un-pay-tree-aughts in advance of the campaign season aw-shucksing..."

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