Mark Doty's DEEP LANE shortlisted for the 2015 TS Eliot Prize

We're excited to share that Mark Doty's DEEP LANE has been selected as one of ten finalists for the annual TS Eliot Prize, one of the UK's most prestigious poetry awards. Doty has taken home the prize once before, in 1995 for his collection MY ALEXANDRIA. Previous winners also include Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, and Sharon Olds. 

This year's judges are poets Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Ahren Warner. Petit has praised the shortlisted books for their "ambition, verve and technical mastery." 

The TS Eliot Prize Readings will be held on January 10, 2016, in London. The winner will be announced the next day.

See the full shortlist here.

John Waters's commencement address to be published

Earlier this year at the Rhode Island School of Design, "filth elder" John Waters gave a brilliant commencement address in which he encouraged boldness in artistic expression and challenged students to "Horrify us with new ideas." Having been shared widely across the internet, the speech is now set to be published by Algonquin Books — in true Waters fashion, there will be artwork along with the text.

Watch the speech (and read an interview with John) here.

Michael Christie's IF I FALL, IF I DIE is long-listed for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Huge congratulations to Michael Christie for making the longlist of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of the biggest prizes for fiction in Canada. Past winners include Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje, and this year, twenty two books were selected from a record number of submitted titles. The shortlist will be announced on October 5, 2015.

Of the longlist, the jury (including John Boyne, Cecil Foster, Alexander MacLeod, Alison Pick, and Helen Oyeyemi) wrote: “It’s been a joy to immerse ourselves in a world of fiction that speaks of the past and present, of women and men, of rural and urban identities, of humans and animals, of lives lived well and lives lived badly. While the writing we’ve encountered has been marked by audacity and wit, eccentricity and elegance, it has also reminded us of the extraordinary treasures to be found in contemporary Canadian literature."

See the full longlist here.

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A rave of Lauren Groff's FATES AND FURIES gets the cover of this week's Book Review

"There’s always the danger, with novels structured around a marriage, that they’ll be perceived as centrally concerned not only with that particular relationship but with the nature of marriage itself. A domestic union set prominently in a work of fiction has the sometimes unfortunate capacity to obscure whatever else is going on. Yet “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s remarkable new novel, explodes and rages past any such preconceptions, insisting that the examination of a long-term relationship can be a perfect vehicle for exploring no less than the nature of existence — the domestic a doorway to the philosophical."

Read the full review here.

 

Ottessa Moshfegh's EILEEN is on the cover of the NYTBR, and it's a RAVE!

Lily King reviews Ottessa Moshfegh's EILEEN on the cover of the Book Review:

“Eileen is anything but generic. Eileen is as vivid and human as they come.”

“Seductive novel”

“Moshfegh…writes beautiful sentences. One after the other they unwind – playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp."

"The beginning of this novel is so impressive, so controlled yet whimsical, fresh and thrilling, you feel she can do anything.”

“There is that wonderful tension between wanting to slow down and bathe in the language and imagery, and the impulse to race to see what happens, how it happens."

Read the full review here.