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.”

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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."

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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
KX8OTZ-007
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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Christopher Bollen takes on the North Fork of Long Island

"Artists, collectors, curators and gallerists with homes on the East End of Long Island are sure to be scanning a new murder mystery next summer to see if they get bumped off.

Christopher Bollen, former editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, has written, 'Orient,' set in the same North Fork town where real-life residents include artists Rob Pruitt, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, Wade Guyton, T. J. Wilcox and Kelley Walker.

'People will see themselves in some of the characters,' warns Bollen, who hatched the plot while staying an artist’s home in the titular town. 'There’s the Russian collector, the Swiss gallerist and the crazy older photographer.'"

- Page Six

Read the full article here.

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It's Tiny's turn to shine in a new book by David Levithan

“If you couldn’t get enough of big gay hero Tiny Cooper in “Will Grayson, Will Grayson,” then gird your loins and warm up your vocal chords: He’s back, in an amazing musical companion novel! “Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story” is David Levithan’s own enthusiastic followup to the book he co-wrote with John Green, in which Tiny gets his long-awaited and much-deserved turn in the spotlight. And while it won’t be on shelves until March 2015, we’ve got an exclusive first peek at its beautiful cover, which is decorated with some very holiday season-appropriate sparkle.

MTV News got in touch with Levithan to get some scoop about the “Tiny Cooper” cover, and the story behind it.”

– MTV News

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