Although John Updike may have been better known for his novels, he was once described by Lorrie Moore as, “quite possibly. . . American literature’s greatest short story writer, and arguably our greatest writer.”
Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for his Rabbit series and won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his large anthology of short stories, The Early Stories 1953-1975. In the preface for that collection, he wrote that his intention had been to “give the mundane its beautiful due.” In 2006 Updike was also awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement.
You can read more about his career here and here.
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The Story Prize, an annual award for a book of short fiction, has announced the finalists from the works published in 2008. The three books were chosen from 73 collections published by 56 publishers.
The finalists are:
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
This year’s judges are Daniel Menaker, Rick Simonson, and One Story’s Hannah Tinti.
The Story Prize ceremony will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in NYC at 7:30pm Wednesday, March 4. The three finalists will read selections from their work, after which Larry Dark will interview each writer on-stage. The winner will receive $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will receive $5,000.
It’s a fun event. Last year, the winner was the person who was slated to read last (and set apart in the program). I wonder if they’ll change it up this year so it’s a little less obvious and more of a surprise.
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Hortense Calisher, author of more than 20 books and a four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for the short story, died on Tuesday.
Calisher once said about writing:
”I’ve said that anything can be written about. I think that nothing is too sacred to be written about, and if it is sacred, you would want to be sacred writing it.”
You can read more about her here.
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My friend Rachel Cantor forwarded a new website she found on Facebook. I really must start to venture into Facebook, even if people do post pictures of their babies (instead of themselves) on their profiles–something I find kind of creepy.
Andrew’s Book Club features two short story collections a month. The idea is to purchase short story collections and use our collective purchasing power to send a message to the publishing industry. The message is: “We Love Short Stories!”
This month’s indie pick for the book club is Allison Amend’s short story collection, Things That Pass for Love.
Coincidentally, Allison Amend is this month’s One Story Reading Series author, so please come by, check out the reading and buy her book.Click here to find out more about the reading.
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It’s no mystery that I’m not very great with technical things and apparently it took a very nice person named Tyler C. Gore from Literal Latte to notice that our site had been hacked by pharmaceutical spam. I guess that’s why this site was getting tons of spam emails from people wanting me to improve my size.
Hopefully, our webmaster has fixed the problem. I just approved a bunch of comments that had been lost to the murky mire of Viagra Spams. All those comments are now on the website. Sorry about that.
Please take the time to see what some people thought…a few months ago.
This is also a great time to check out Literal Latte. I remember picking up copies of Literal Latte in bookstores and shops while I was in college. It was kind of like the Craig’s List for the literary because it was distributed for free. And you know how New Yorkers love free stuff. Now the magazine is on the web and it prides itself on publishing new voices. 98% of what they publish comes from the slush pile. You can find their latest issue here.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
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