2009 PEN Literary Awards

PEN American Center has announced its 2009 Literary Award winners. The ceremony will be hosted by poet Billy Collins on May 19 in New York.

The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction goes to a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature. The award carries a stipend of $25,000. This year’s honoree is Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, and now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

McCarthy’s fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West—the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), and Blood Meridian (1985). All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1992, is the first volume in McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy, and was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He is also the author of The Stone Mason: A Play in Five Acts. McCarthy is also the recipient of a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, among other grants.

The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2008—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. The winner receives a cash award of $35,000, a stipend intended to permit a significant degree of leisure in which to pursue a second work of literary fiction. The fellowship was established in memory of Robert Bingham, who died in 1999 at the age of 33, to commemorate his support of young writers, his love of literature, and his contribution to literary fiction. This year’s award goes to Donald Ray Pollack for his collection Knockemstiff (Doubleday). The finalists are Rivka Galchen for Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger (Free Press).

The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories are the product of a new partnership between Vintage and PEN American Center. Since 1919, twenty stories have been chosen each year and collected in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories, whose original and present mission is to strengthen the art of the short story. Now in partnership with PEN, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories continues the tradition of recognizing excellence in the short story and encouraging writers and readers alike to celebrate the form. This year’s recipients are Graham Joyce, Kristen Sundberg Lunstrum, E. V. Slate, John Burnside, Mohan Sikka, L. E. Miller, Alistair Morgan, Roger Nash, Manuel Muñoz, Caitlin Horrocks, Ha Jin, Paul Theroux, Judy Troy, Nadine Gordimer, Viet Dinh, Karen Brown, Marisa Silver, Paul Yoon, Andrew Sean Greer, and Junot Díaz.

The PEN Translation Prize goes to book-length translations from any language into English published during the previous calendar year. The $3,000 prize has been conferred since 1963 in recognition of the art of the literary translator, and it is the first American award to do so. This year’s award goes to Natasha Wimmer for her translation from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The finalists for the award are Jordan Stump for his translation from the French of The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre (Archipelago Books) and Joel Rotenberg for his translation from the German of The Post- Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (NYRB Classics).

We've got all of these winning books. In fact, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection is hot off the press! Check out the rest of the awards at the PEN Web site.

New Palahniuk Novel On Sale Today!

Pygmy, the newest novel from local fave Chuck Palahniuk, goes on sale today. The publisher describes it as "'The Manchurian Candidate' meets 'South Park.'" Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion and has been trained since infancy in martial arts, chemistry, and radical hatred of the United States. He has six months to build a prize-winning project for the National Science Fair. If he succeeds, he and his project will go to Washington, D.C. for the finals competition -- where the project will explode, killing millions.
It’s a comedy -- albeit a dark one, about terrorism and racism. And it's a romance. And it will make you think. In other words, it's vintage Palahniuk.

Palahniuk grew up in Burbank, Washington, and lives in the Portland area. He earned his degree from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism in 1986. In his mid-30s he started writing novels, working with Tom Spanbauer and his Dangerous Writers writing workshops. Some of his novels include Fight Club, Lullaby, Choke, and his two most recent: Rant and Snuff. Several of his books have been made into movies. He has also written a nonfiction book about the oddities of Portland called Fugitives and Refugees.

Come get your copy of Pygmy today! We'd be happy to save a copy for you.

Final Percy Jackson Book!

On our shelves and ready to fly out the door first thing Tuesday morning: The final book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, by Rick Riordan. The Last Olympian, the eagerly anticipated final book in the five-book series, tells of the battle for Western Civilization raging on the streets of Manhattan, as the Half-Bloods battle against Kronos's Titans, and the prophecy surrounding Percy's sixteenth birthday unfolds. I can't wait to read it myself!

PBS to Air Kurt Wallander Episodes

Starting Sunday, May 10th, PBS will air three Kurt Wallander mysteries on Masterpiece Mystery. The Kurt Wallander series, by Swedish author Henning Mankell, began with the book Faceless Killers, published in 1991. The PBS episodes, in which Kurt Wallander is portrayed by Kenneth Branaugh, will be based on three of Mankell's books: Sidetracked (May 10th), Firewall (May 17th), and One Step Behind (May 31st).

Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948, raised in a village in northern Sweden and now divdes his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as the director of a theater, Teatro Avenida. Kurt Wallander remains one of the most impressive and credible creations of crime fiction today. The first Wallander book was written in response to the social chaos Mankell encountered on his return to Sweden from Africa in early 1989. Neo-fascist attacks on immigrants had increased during his two years in Mozambique. "Racism is a crime, and I thought: okay, I'll use the crime story. Then I realized I needed a police officer." He plucked the name "Wallander" out of the telephone directory. "It was May 20 1989 (I looked it up in an old diary) when Kurt was born."

Readers like the Wallander books for their edgy, convincing police work and coverage of social concerns. Mankell makes you reflect on society. Questions of responsibility and morality - of justice and democracy - are explicitly raised, which is unusual in detective fiction. "I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks," Mankell says. "You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society." He says the best crime story he has ever read is Macbeth - "a terrible allegory about the corrupting tendency of power that could equally be about President Nixon."

Mankell cites John le Carré as a key influence and admires the way he develops the character George Smiley with each subsequent book. "If you can call le Carré a crime writer, he investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society; and I hope to do the same." In addition to his thrillers, he has written children's books and novels on African themes. In Sweden one of his most faithful admirers is Ingmar Bergman; Mankell is married to the film director's daughter, Eva. In Africa, Mankell is passionately committed to the fight against AIDS and devotes much of his spare time to his "memory books" project, which aims to raise awareness of the catastrophe. Parents with AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories not just for their children, but as a human chronicle as well.

Le Guin Wins Another Nebula Award

Portland's own treasure, Ursula K. Le Guin, was awarded a Nebula Award for best novel of 2008 on Saturday, April 25th, for the book Powers, the third book of The Annals of the Western Shore saga (following Gifts, Voices). The Nebula Awards® are annual awards presented by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to celebrate excellence in science fiction and fantasy writing.

In Powers, a young slave named Gav finds that he has amazing powers of recollection: he can remember a page of text after seeing it only once, and sometimes, he can even "remember" things that haven't happened yet. Gav's world is turned brutally upside-down when his sister is killed by a member of the household he has been taught to trust, and, blinded by sorrow, he runs away from the only world he has ever known, embarking on a journey of transformation and discovery.

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958. Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, more than a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms.

Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for more forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people.

Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award.

Cold Beer on Warm Days

Yesterday was deliciously sunny and warm, and you know what that made me think about: tall cold mugs of beer. Mmmmmm. And that made me think about the new novel by Tom Robbins. Why would that be, you might ask. Because his new book, his first novel since 2003, is called B is for Beer. His editor describes it as a "hallucinogenic hymn to beer, children, and the cosmic mysteries that sustain us all." It's a small tome -- just over 100 pages -- and is subtitled A Children's Book for Grown-ups, A Grown-up Book for Children.

At the book's launch party, Robbins thanked the crowd for coming to "what amounts to just another typical children’s book about beer.” Hmmmm. Can't say that I've run across a lot of those in my book career. “There’s no such thing as a bad beer, but there are bad beer drinkers,” he said. In B Is for Beer, he didn’t just want to explain the history of beer to his audience, he also wanted to explore the mystery and wonder of it, its sociological implications, and the way alcohol can be used to “rearrange the furniture of the brain,” and its ability to occasionally “elevate conversation” despite alcohol’s limitations.

The book offers a Beer Fairy and beautiful language. Robbins writes that Seattle’s drizzle is a “soft rain that could be mistaken for a mean case of witch measles,” and leaves “a damp gray rash on everything, as though the city were a baby that had been left too long in a wet diaper and then rolled in newspaper.” This is what the back cover of the book has to say:

"Once upon a time (right about now) there was a planet (how about this one?) whose inhabitants consumed thirty-six billion gallons of beer each year (it's a fact, you can Google it). Among those affected, each in his or her own way, by all the bubbles, burps, and foam, was a smart, wide-eyed, adventurous kindergartner named Gracie; her distracted mommy; her insensitive dad; her non-conformist uncle; and a magical, butt-kicking intruder from a world within our world. Populated by the aforementioned characters—and as charming as it may be subversive—B Is for Beer involves readers, young and old, in a surprising, far-reaching investigation into the limits of reality, the transformative powers of children, and, of course, the ultimate meaning of a tall, cold brewski."

In an interview several years ago, Robbins told of a review of one of his books in the New York Times in which the writer said something like, "Robbins needs to make up his mind between whether he wants to be funny or serious." And he remembers thinking "I'll make my mind up when God makes up his."

Robbins, who has lived in La Conner, Washington, since 1970, is the author of Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and Still Life with Woodpecker, among other works of fiction.

International "Buy Indie" Day

Happy May Day! Besides being May Day, today is also International "Buy Indie" Day, the day everyone is encouraged to go to one of their local independent bookstores and buy at least one book -- paperback, hardback, audiobook, whatever works for you! "Buy Indie" Day was started by Joseph Finder, an author and writer who is tired of seeing his local independent bookstores go out of business.

We'd love to see you at Broadway Books to celebrate "Buy Indie" Day. Roberta is there this morning, and I'll be there this afternoon until 7 pm. Come on down and see us! We both love to talk books, so if you want a recommendation on something to read for yourself, or for a gift, just ask. There are so many incredibly wonderful new books arriving at the store each day this time of year it's hard even for us to keep up -- but we try!. And just like I think we should all try to make Earth Day every day, I'm not opposed to "Buy Indie" Day happening more than once a year. ☺