Shelfari

Omni Daily News

By Tom

PEN/Faulkner shortlist: No appearances by multiple past winners Roth, Doctorow, and Jin among this year's PEN/Faulkner Award nominees, announced today. The winner will be announced on March 23 from these finalists: War Dances by Sherman Alexie, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead,A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, and Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories by Lorraine M. Lopez.

"We sat at a pavement table in the traffic fumes and drank cold beer": Hilary Mantel on the "happiest day of my life": returning to England and staking her claim as a professional novelist in 1986 after four years living under the constraints of Saudi Arabia.

"I boiled it, and then I ate it": John Wray and Zach Galifianakis try to out-deadpan each other (watch to the end to see Wray lose the battle) regarding Wray's novel Lowboy, just out in paperback. Am I presuming too much to assume this conversation took place in Brooklyn? I do like the binary typewriter!

Moving & shaking: A Morning Edition interview with Adam Haslett sends his debut novel, Union Atlantic, up our charts and onto this morning's Movers & Shakers list.

Margaret Atwood on Creativity, Ants, and The Year of the Flood

By Jeff VanderMeer

As part of Tallahassee's Seven Days of Opening Nights celebration of the arts, Margaret Atwood came to read and answer questions at Florida State University. Thanks to the largesse of author Mark Mustian, whose The Gendarme will be published late this year by Putnam, my wife Ann and I had front-row seats right next to Robert Olen Butler, who we were kind enough not to bother as he pecked away at his iphone.

Atwood was charming and had a dry wit and wickedly dark sense of humor. She mentioned that she's currently reading E.O. Wilson's Anthill, a first novel out in April, for review, and noted that she's perfectly qualified for this assignment given that her father was an entomologist. Wilson is also revered as a saint in her near-future novel The Year of the Flood. Wilson, of course, is best known for his groundbreaking nonfiction works on ants. Wilson was "brave" for switching to fiction at this point in his career, Atwood said, a mischievous gleam in her eye, and confirmed that she would not be ditching books for ant studies any time soon. However, Atwood did mention that her first novel, written at the age of seven, was about an ant. "For the longest time, nothing happened" in the novel because Atwood made the fatal mistake of beginning her novel with her protagonist as an egg, then a pupa, and so on. Wilson's chosen, she said, "the definitive moment" for his opening: "It starts with the death of the queen, and what comes after."

Atwood also made good, serious points about specificity of detail. One audience member asked her how things have changed for women since her The Handmaiden's Tale came out, and Atwood rightly noted that her novel was about a specific type of possible dystopic society, regardless of any reflections of contemporary attitudes it might have contained"”more in the vein of 1984, Brave New World, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's Wethan something like Orlando.

When asked about how to foster creativity, she noted that kids all paint, sing, dance, and express creativity, only to later be given the impression that they must specialize in something "since we all need dentists," but made it clear that everyone has creativity and expresses it in some way. This is a different question than whether someone has what it takes to be, for example, a professional writer. Writing, Atwood insisted, is a vocation that can become a profession, but if it isn't a calling she implied that perhaps pursuing a career in it isn't the best idea. She further made a quietly impassioned argument for novels being the most immersive way in which we can experience what it's like to be inside another person's head.

As for the reading, she chose three sections from her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, corresponding to snippets from all three viewpoint characters. Bravely, she ended with a section that was a sermon by an environmentalist religious leader on the occasion of the festival of underground creatures"”a children's festival "since things that live underground tend to be small." The brave part was actually singing the hymn that concludes the scene, although as she said after "hymns were meant to be sung by ordinary people, and that's what you got." It was a confident and entertaining performance.

In terms of her place in world literature, she said without arrogance that if she'd known she was going to become so famous, she wouldn't have named the company that protects her copyrights something as frivolous as "O.W. Toad" (an anagram of "Atwood"), and in a darkly funny way stated that soon enough Canadian writers wouldn't have her around to intimidate them, since she'd be as dead as "the English writers I read growing up, who thus posed no problem" to her development, "being so remote". Here's to hoping that day is many years away.

   

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: William T. Vollmann on The Routes of Man by Ted Conover: "Conover's travelogues can be fascinating in and of themselves, and his
  meditations about roads frequently achieve an even higher order "”
  thoughtful, temperate and generous all at once.... As I read this book, I grew increasingly impressed not only with
  Conover's bravery and hardihood, which he underplays, but, more
  important, with that quality one associates with Steinbeck: heart. Here
  is a man who cares about people everywhere, not merely that convenient
  abstraction, humanity, but people in particular "” not to mention this
  American toad and that Peruvian sloth."
• Maslin on Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson: "It's the reader who is apt to be susceptible: read this one page, and
  you may find you've fallen head over heels for Ms. Simonson's funny,
  barbed, delightfully winsome storytelling. Don't say you weren't warned.... As with the polished work of Alexander McCall Smith, there is never a
  dull moment but never a discordant note either. Still, this book feels
  fresh despite its conventional blueprint. Its main characters are
  especially well drawn, and Ms. Simonson makes them as admirable as they
  are entertaining. They are traditionally built, and that's not just Mr.
  McCall Smith's euphemism. It's about intelligence, heart, dignity and
  backbone. 'Major Pettigrew's Last Stand' has them all."
• Frank Bruni on Conspirata by Robert Harris: "Will Cicero survive, entrails intact? What of the Republic he governs?
  History buffs can already answer those questions, so it's to Robert
  Harris's considerable credit that he wrings some suspense from them,
  producing a fact-based novel that's deliciously juicy and fleetly paced
  "” maybe too fleetly, all told: the comically foreboding title
  foreshadows Harris's principal intentions, which are to make you gasp,
  titter and turn the pages. This you will surely do, but with an
  engagement limited by an occasional sense of silly overkill."
• William Giraldi on Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch: "[T]he
  stories and novella here are gifts of precision, narratives with the
  poise to depict entire lives unstrung by the end of things. Lynch's
  aptitude for fiction comes as no shock; he's been a teller of tales all
  along, his poems and essays occupied by vivid characters siphoned from
  the world he moves through. How does a mortician/scribe avoid confusion
  with the Reaper to tell his own grim tales? Lynch does not recoil from
  the gruesome facts of his trade or the insights they have allowed him,
  but he commands the light as well as the darkness. Nihilism is nowhere
  in these stories, and love is everywhere embraced."

Washington Post:

• Carolyn See on Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt: "The story is about coping with grief, caring for children and creating
  an ad hoc family for as long as this particular configuration is
  required, but mostly it's a textbook on what constitutes perfect
  writing and how to be a class act.... 'Making Toast,' with luck, will serve that function ... for many readers who will turn to this for information on
  how to live a treacherous life with wit, humor, courage and good
  manners strong enough to hold back the demons of monstrous death and
  meaningless loss."
• Charles on Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd: "As a reader, this is the kind of opening that makes me think, "NO! NO!
  RUN!" .... Surely, you keep hoping, his first
  thriller will get better than this. And it does.
  
  
  Once Boyd lays out that thread-worn crisis, in fact, the rest of his novel quickly grows rich and engaging.... This is a novel about the frailty of identity, the anonymity of modern
  city life, the frightening and thrilling possibilities of personal
  reinvention....
  
  What follows is the story of a hunted man, the chapters propelled
  along thrillingly at just the right moments by sudden reversals,
  revelations and reprisals."
• Art Taylor on The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum: "Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum['s]
  immensely entertaining study of New York City's first chief medical
  examiner, Charles Norris, and his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler.... Blum illuminates these tales of Norris and Gettler and their era with a
  dedication and exuberance that reflect the men themselves. Not only is 'The Poisoner's Handbook' as thrilling as any 'CSI' episode, but it
  also offers something even better: an education in how forensics really
  works."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jonathan Shapiro on The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell: "Fans of Mankell's earlier Kurt Wallander mystery series will enjoy the
  intellectual provocations of the new book. Part police procedural, part
  political manifesto, Mankell manages to wrap an erudite analysis of
  imperialism around an entertaining whodunit. Not even fellow Swede Stieg Larsson has managed to pull that off.... Like the songs of ABBA, Larsson is sometimes insipid but never boring;
  like the plays of August Strindberg, Mankell is often dull but never
  stupid. Larsson's books are immediately addictive and impossible to put
  down. Mankell's books are an acquired taste, as catchy as a cello
  sonata, but filled with the kind of deep, ruminative writing that
  rewards concentration and patience."
• Amy Wilentz on The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams: "Lorraine Adams is a singular and important American writer. 'The Room
  and the Chair' establishes this without question: It is remarkable for
  its ambitions and its achievements.... [O]ne of the triumphs of this book is that it's a war novel that's mostly
  about women: Mary, Mabel and Baby as well as Vera, the reporter and
  truth seeker. Though often unwitting tools and even more often
  thwarted, they are the fulcrum of the book, lifting what might
  otherwise be a dazzling thriller into the realm of literature."
  

Globe and Mail:

• Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams on You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier: "His much-awaited first book, You are Not a Gadget, is certainly the most erudite, albeit slightly disjointed, discussion of the downside of the digital age to date.... The most disappointing aspect of Lanier's book is his troubling
  equation of the collaborative communities on the Web with
  Stalinist-style collectivism. Mass collaboration and Soviet
  collectivism are really polar opposites.... Lanier is a contrarian of the digital age and an effective one at that.
  However, the debates that he and others have stimulated about the
  nature of the Web and its impact on how we work, learn, live and think,
  ironically belie his core thesis that we are all becoming mindless
  gadgets marching to some unitary, authoritarian collective voice."
• Susan Pinker on The Trauma Myth by Susan Clancy: "This short, punchy work tells two connected stories. The first is
  Clancy's well-written empirical account of how child sexual abuse
  really happens, why victims often stay silent and the real reasons for
  the oft-delayed, damaging aftermath of abuse. The second story is about
  how we crucify scientists whose findings don't match our preconceptions.... This co-opting of a child's loyalty and 'participation' is what prompts
  great distress in victims later, according to Clancy, by reinforcing
  their sense of culpability and isolation. She argues persuasively that,
  for most victims, we need to shift our concept of abuse from the
  violent rape model to something more varied and subtle if we want to
  succeed at treatment and prevention."

The Guardian:

• Blake Morrison on Reality Hunger by David Shields: "They're right to call Reality Hunger an important book. The fiction vs non-fiction debate has become intense in recent years, and Shields cranks it up a notch.... The real problem, though, is the central thesis. It's smart,
  stimulating and aphoristic, even when the aphorisms are stolen. But the
  more you think about it, the dodgier it seems.... Shields has written a provocative and entertaining manifesto. But in
  his hunger for reality, he forgets that fiction also offers the
  sustenance of truth."
• Marcus Sedgwick on Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones: "It's always the sign of a truly accomplished writer when their book holds you, despite the fact that not awfully much happens. Enchanted Glass is no exception to Diana Wynne Jones's
  ­general rule of using, and possibly abusing, folklore and fantasy for
  her own splendid ends, mixing the spectacularly ordinary life of a
  university town satellite village with everyday magic, and a potent
  dash of A Midsummer Night's Dream.... Wynne Jones belongs to an elect clan of the most treasured of British
  children's authors, creating her own unique brand of fantasy, in the
  same manner as Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, and it's surely this
  experience that breeds the confidence to write with such subtle depth.
  Blissful."

The New Yorker:

• Louis Menand on Manufacturing Depression by Gary Greenberg and The Emperor's New Drugs by Irving Kirsch: "Two new books, Gary Greenberg's 'Manufacturing Depression' and Irving Kirsch's 'The Emperor's New Drugs,' suggest that dissensus prevails even among the dissidents.
  Both authors are hostile to the current psychotherapeutic regime, but
  for reasons that are incompatible.... If Kirsch is right and antidepressant drugs aren't doing anything
  consequential to our brains, then it can't also be the case that they
  are turning us into Stepford wives or Nietzsche's 'last men,' the sort
  of thing that worries Greenberg. By Kirsch's account, we are in danger
  of bankrupting our health-care system by spending nearly ten billion
  dollars a year on worthless pills. But if Greenberg is right we're in
  danger of losing our ability to care. Is psychopharmacology evil, or is
  it useless?"

Harper's (subscription only):

• William Gass on Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen and Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson: "Hamsun was more than a living encyclopedia of distasteful traits, for
  traits need only be mentioned once, like the cleft of a chin; whereas
  our principal biographers"”Ingar Kolloen and Robert Ferguson"”must
  bravely repeat the occasions when they are displayed. Hamsun, it seems,
  had pejorative names for every creature he felt he outstripped, which
  was most of them"”the native Lapps in particular. He grew quickly sick
  of old people, even when he became one; regarded tourists with disdain;
  mistrusted intellectuals of every mental elevation; was a practicing
  misogynist, detesting just those women he most desired. He hated whole
  nations, especially if they spoke English, or anybody who belonged to
  the urban working class, and he held in contempt all forms of public
  life."

--Tom

Omni Daily Crush: "The Furies"

By Tom

I do love a good lost classic, and I'm a tiresomely vocal fan of NYRB Classics (though I clearly have a rival in this guy), so Janet Hobhouse's posthumous novel, The Furies (not to be confused with this future lost classic of the same name), comes with a superb pedigree. Not only does it have the unerring-so-far NYRB stamp of approval, but as far as I know it's the only book, aside of course from The Stones of Summer, to be brought back into print as a result of the Lost Books Club, the organization Mark Moskowitz started after the success of his lost-classics ur-doc, Stone Reader. On the LBC site, he tells the story of how he found the book, via Hobhouse's ex-husband, by then a BBC producer. (And that backhanded recommendation both makes the book appealing and provides a small portrait of a marriage: "not like her others, quite a good
one, you may find it excellent. She really hit the mark with it. A
surprise.")

I had forgotten that story by the time I picked up a copy of The Furies myself, and so I came to it almost cold. What drew me to it were the opening pages, which can hold their own with almost any for setting up the anticipatory tingle of a good story about to be told. Here are the opening two sentences:

Photographs are not memories...

For a long time my mother and I lived such a solitary life, city-trapped and economically precarious, so isolated from anything resembling family or stability, so utterly dependent on one another to provide a lovable human universe, that the existence of forebears, documented in hundreds of photgraphs--brown as leaves and dog-eared, but vivid, stylized, ornate, above all theatrical--seems to me even now a kind of fairy tale, not only in relation to what then seemed plausible but even in the terms in which it was cast.

"Such a solitary life ...", "so isolated ...", "so utterly dependent ...": the opening goes on at this pitch for another two vivid but coolly observed pages. That was enough to sell me, and after I read them I put the book aside for my next vacation. When that vacation came last week, I was a little surprised that the narrator then spends the rest of the lengthy prologue telling the story of these lost forebears, with details she only came to learn late in life. I'm still not sure what I think of that move, but once you do descend into the hothouse of the mother-daughter relationship (although descend is the wrong word--there's as much love and light there as misery) all else fades into the background. I next put my head up for air about 150 pages in, marveling at how much life, observation, and emotion she had packed into a relatively short space. It's intense and elegant, a history of places and moods as much as a plotted story.

The novel is always described as autobiographical (or even as a memoir), and by all accounts it is deeply so, but for some reason that only really clicked for me in the latter stages of the book. It was her account of her affair with a monkishly seductive writer named "Jack"--so thinly veiled even I could recognize him as Philip Roth--that woke me up to how close the details of her life were to the surface. (She doesn't seem to be playing Rothian identity games here, just laying a faint scrim over the facts.) I don't know the details of the composition of the book yet, just that she had nearly finished it when she died of cancer at the age of 42 (a diagnosis included in the book). The sections of the book on her adult life feel less finished than the earlier ones, which is true of many memoirs, but strangely enough in those parts, whether it's because they are less polished or because they cover the more worldly events of adulthood, you feel like you are scraping more closely against real, verifiable life, and ever since finishing I've wanted to find out more about her. You can read a good interview with her from 1987 in Bomb, but the best place to dig further, per Moskowitz, would be the collection of her papers at Rutgers. For anyone who has read The Furies, cold bibliographical details like these from the library listing carry a great emotional weight:

... photographs, [ca. 1960]-1989; and other papers,
1953-1990, among which are school papers. Also papers of Hobhouse's
mother Frances (Liedloff) Hobhouse (1925-1979), [ca. 1885]-1979; of her
husband Nicholas Fraser, 1970-1979; and of her great aunt Frances
Bolton, 1964-1983. Additional papers present consist of miscellaneous
letters received by other relatives and friends.

The
papers of Frances Hobhouse, a sculptor who lived in New York City,
include letters received, 1955-1979, chiefly from family members
(including daughter Janet Hobhouse while in England); diaries,
1971-1979, documenting a period of deepening depression that ended in
suicide; photographs, [ca. 1885]-1979; and personal miscellany,
1958-1976.

Recommended for fans of The Liar's Club by Mary Karr and Father and Son by Edmund Gosse.

--Tom

P.S. I'm trying to remember in which of Roth's books (The Counterlife?) he wrote about an affair with an English neighbor who I now realize was based on Hobhouse, but in the meantime I ran across this surprising little anecdote from his friend Richard Stern's memoir, A Sistermony:

Lately, [Roth had] been driving to his friend Janet Hobhouse's grave
and talking to her. (He told me Janet's history, the English father who
deserted her, her Jewish sculptress mother who'd killed herself, her
terrible post-Oxford marriage -punches and burned manuscripts "“ her
good book on Gertrude Stein, two bad novels, her brilliance, beauty and
sympathetic power; then cancer, a final affair "“ with Jeremy Irons "“
and death at forty-two.) "I tell her things I don't tell anyone. I ask
her advice. And get it."

Her "two bad novels"--man, the men in her life didn't like her other books...

Omni Daily News

By Anne Bartholomew

The golden age of classics: Behold: I think this beats all. I'm not sure if it's the final cover (see our page), but it's got my vote. What will they think of next? (via The Book Bench)

The Bridge to the White House: The New Yorker's David Remnick will write a biography of President Obama, releasing April 9 from Knopf. No page on our site yet, but Sonny Mehta notes that "The Bridge reveals not only his character, but also his
trials, motivations, and perspectives in a way that a memoir, even a
remarkable one, cannot." (via GalleyCat)

A new kind of bathroom reading?Definitely more sanitary. (via Abe Books)

2009 Book Prize Finalists: The LA Times has announced its annual prize finalists, this year in 10 categories (adding graphic novels for the first time). Winners will be awarded on April 23. We're happy to see some of our own favorites for the year represented (full list available here).

Moving & shaking: Helen Simonson's debut novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (available March 2), vaults up our daily list to the #2 slot.

End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

By Paul

Quick links from around the kid-lit blogosphere:

Foiled! Look, a treat from Publishers Weekly: they have an excerpt from kid-lit writer Jane Yolen's first graphic novel, called Foiled. Just to give you a taste, here is an excerpt of the excerpt:

Rachel Cohn Q&A. The co-author of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist talks to School Library Journal about her upcoming YA novel Very LeFreak. ("The book grew out of the very first novel I wrote in 1996, which was never published. The book was about an online bon vivant who was a total recluse in her personal life. Her online fantasy life gets out of control, and she's sent to a Betty Ford Center-type place for people who need to dry out from technology.")

"Kids' Lit: Beyond Paper Books." The Huffington Post just had an interesting piece on the fate of books in the "Google generation"--and especially on what kids' books (such as 39 Clues) are already spreading beyond the page into Web sites, movies, collectible cards, and more.

"What Are They Reading for Fun?" SLJ collects some raw intel from the librarian front lines. The quick answer? "Given the movie tie-ins, they're into Nicholas Sparks, Alice Sebold, and Rick Riordan." Als "Vampires are still in, but so are werewolves, demons, faeries, and psychics."

George O'Connor Q&A. We've mentioned George O'Connors excellent Greek mythology books before, and now Publishers Weekly is following up with an interview. ("When I was in the fourth grade, my class did a lengthy segment on Greek mythology and we read the stories, presented oral reports while dressed as the gods--I was Hermes, paper wings taped to sneakers, wearing a bedsheet toga--and drew pictures of the myths. That was what did it for me--I was drawing muscley men and beautiful scantily clad women fighting scary monsters, and that was my actual assignment! Normally, that's what I would've been yelled at for drawing, rather than paying attention to math or something. ")

"Top 100 Children's Novels." Fuse #8's Top 100 round-ups are always fun (not to mention exhaustive and educational) and the "Top 100 Children's Novels" list is no exception. Because she packs so much into every post, you don't want to wait until the end to start reading--so wade on in at the halfway mark if you haven't already, in which you can see (approximately) 100,000 covers for The Wind in the Willows (among other things). And/or start back at the beginning.

Fuse #8 in Forbes. Speaking of Fuse #8--and the very nice person behind it--check out a Forbes profile of the one and only Betsy Bird. ("By day, a librarian. By night, the most powerful blogger in kids' books." Sounds like a superhero to me.)

Jerry Pinkney vid. Thanks to Children's Illustration for this sweet clip of Jerry Pinkney, talking about his experiences growing up:

--Paul

Omni Daily Crush: "Forking Fantastic! Put the Party Back in Dinner Party"

By Mari Malcolm

Fact: I fantasize daily about dinner parties. While taming chaos in my garden this weekend, I mentally arranged bouquets, lit candles, and welcomed guests who devoured feasts and warmed the night with stories and drunken laughter, their faces lit by a crackling fire in the imaginary outdoor fireplace.

It's not a stretch to say that my desire for these sorts of gatherings--fed by shimmering memories of open-air feasts in places and with people I've loved--has been my visceral motivation for making our garden, which has consumed most of my non-work time for six years now. This summer, as so much of this sweaty work comes to fruition, we must pause in our labor to celebrate!

Complicating Fact: Dinner parties stress the hell out of me (or rather, they have in the past). The need to keep guests not only occupied, but entertained; the pressure for the food not just to be good, but all hot at the same time. I don't enough time and energy to recreate anything Martha would endorse, but that hasn't stopped me from trying--and then wondering why I wasn't enjoying my own party.

Everyone deserves the happiness of sharing home-made dinner with friends--and relaxing enough to be truly present. In parties past, I've transcended the stress for some wonderful, wine-soaked moments, but I never actually had a blast at my own party until last New Year's Eve. Seized by the spirit of Zora O'Neill and Tamara Reynolds's Forking Fantastic! Put the Party Back in Dinner Party, I invited a few friends over for dinner, and when they all accepted, I suddenly realized I had 18 people (OK, one was a baby) coming, and I couldn't get off work to start cooking until 3:30. Oh, and some were staying the weekend. And the bathrooms weren't clean, because Amazon's a busy place during the holidays.

I panicked briefly, then drew courage from Zora and Tamara's down-to-earth, salty-tongued stories about parties gone wrong but still awesome, and drew from their genius strategies for whipping up not just amazing food, but actual fun for all involved. Infused with their spirit, I put my guests to work in the kitchen, and we got three courses plus dessert on the table by 8:00. We all felt proud of the results, and even more fantastic was the forking amazing feeling we got from participating in that essential human ritual of sharing food and time together.

For a taste of Zora and Tamara's style, watch this montage of their Sunday Night Dinners (and don't miss the Naked Chef cameo).

For All Beginning Science Fiction or Fantasy Writers: Clarion San Diego Is Calling

By Jeff VanderMeer

Ever wondered where some of your favorite science fiction or fantasy writers learned how to write great fiction? Chances are they went to the Clarion Writers Workshop. Clarion is widely recognized as a premier training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction short stories. Many graduates have become well-known writers, and a large number have won major awards. Instructors are among the most respected writers and editors working in the field today. The 2010 writers in residence are

Delia Sherman

George R.R. Martin

Dale Bailey

Samuel R. Delany

Jeff VanderMeer

Ann VanderMeer

The six-week workshop is held on the beautiful beachside campus of the University of California, San Diego.

Since its inception in 1968, Clarion has been known as the "boot camp" for writers of speculative fiction. Each year 18 students, ranging in age from late teens to those in mid-career, are selected from applicants who have the potential for highly successful writing careers. Students are expected to write several new short stories during the six-week workshop, and to give and receive constructive criticism. Instructors and students reside together in campus apartments throughout the intensive six-week program.

The application period for the 2010 workshop ends on March 1. Applicants must submit two short stories with their application. Scholarships are available. Additional information can be found at the Clarion website.

As a graduate of Clarion and now a teacher there, with my wife, I can vouch for the usefulness of the workshop. So if any Omnivoracious readers are aspiring SF/F writers, apply now! (Amazon's also provided generous support for both Clarion and Clarion West.)

Omni Daily News

By Jon Foro

Dude. Page 36, third paragraph: The French National Library shells out $9.5 million for the original manuscript of Casanova's memoirs, The Story of My Life. (via The Huffington Post)

They hate him for his killer author photos: Over at The Daily Beast, Olivia Cole examines "Amis-Rage," the conflagration of shrill that erupts each time Martin Amis publishes a book. (More on Amis at The Guardian.)

There's almost certainly somebody who can't wait for this: James Cameron is writing a prequel to Avatar. Kind of like how George Lucas wrote the prequel to The Phantom Menace, when it was called Star Wars, but not yet a prequel. Top that, Cameron. (via abebooks.com's Reading Copy blog)

Moving & Shaking: Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History, a collection of absurd, true-life courtroom exchanges--originally published in 1992--charges to #1 today on our Movers & Shakers list.

--Jon

2009 Nebula Award Finalists For Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Announced

By Jeff VanderMeer

 
 (Image shamelessly stolen from SF Signal, which you should be reading more often anyway.)

The 2009 Nebula Award finalists have been announced, and I'm in the somewhat awkward position of reporting on the nominations whilst having been nominated myself. The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. The awards will be announced at the Nebula Awards Banquet the evening of May 15 at the Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront, just 20 minutes from the Kennedy Space Center in Fla. Other awards to be presented are the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Science Fiction or Fantasy for Young Adults, the Bradbury Award for excellence in screenwriting and the Solstice Award for outstanding contribution to the field.

The finalist for best novel are:

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Nightshade, Sep09)
The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
The City & The City, China Mieville (Del Rey, May09)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

Of these books, the Mieville has received all sorts of praise on Amazon, making the list of the hundred best of the year. The Windup Girl, a complex and dark view of the future, has also gotten appreciation from many reviewers. Boneshaker appears to be a crowd favorite and appeared on the Amazon SF/F Top 10 for 2009. The Barzak novel is a sleeper nomination for a book somewhat overlooked on its initial publication. I must confess I haven't read the Gilman. Congratulations to all of the other nominees.

When I received the call on Wednesday that Finch had been nominated, I was shocked. My first reaction was to assume it was a joke or a miscount of the votes as I had no idea I was even in the running. SFWA, the organization that runs the Nebulas, keeps a tally of nominating votes for various works online, in member-only forums. So if you are a member, and I'm not, you would have a decent sense of whether you might make the ballot. A lot of people contribute to making a book a success, so I'm really happy for my editor, Victoria Blake, the cover designer, John Coulthart, and the publicist, Matt Staggs, who all made Finch work. Finch has also made year's best lists from the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Barnes & Noble Review, and others.

But I'm happy to be on the ballot in part because the selections in the short fiction categories (below the cut) are so diverse in terms of the approaches to storytelling. It's also a nice mix of new and established writers. In trhe past, the Nebula has seemed fairly conservative to me, but in the short fiction categories at least the nominations below begin to hint at a coming sea-change.

I decided to get Mike Allen's reaction to the ballot, as he was a Nebula finalist last year and also edits the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series that published one of this year's short story nominees. He also noted the presence of more Internet and small press selections.

"With all due respect to the print magazines, the Nebula Awards are a writing award, and to me [this] mix better reflects the range of writing that's happening in the field. In that sense, the new Nebula selection methods have made room for improvement."

What does a Nebula nomination for a story from Allen's anthology mean to him? "It means a ton. Norilana Books, my publisher, is a POD-only press. I haven't felt any qualms about that, because the Clockwork Phoenix books are to my mind not commercial; they're art for art's sake. But just because something is small press, and not available in the big chains, and isn't intended to be the reading equivalent of a box of Chicken McNuggets, it doesn't mean that everyone involved isn't doing their damndest to create an excellent product. Here's your proof."

The importance of the Internet to the nomination process has grown in recent years, and Allen argues it's only going to become more important. "I'm not going to kid you: Saladin's story got seen by so many (or at least by enough SFWA members to land him a nomination) not because of book sales but because I picked it to be published online in full at the review blog Fantasy Book Critic as a promotion for the anthology. I'd be willing to bet that's a pretty unconventional route to becoming a Nebula finalist. It's also, of course, proof that Saladin, a dynamic new writer, wrote a damn fine story."

This confirms my own thought that, increasingly, fiction offered online will gain an advantage in awards voted on by readers (or, in this case, writers). Is this a good or a bad thing? The answer isn't that simple. One potential effect will be to create more visibility for less established writers, and thus more visibility for that kind of essential energy. It's an effective way of counterbalancing the natural conservatism of awards. But another effect may be that writers with strong online constituencies will gain an advantage regardless of the quality of their work. How it will ultimately play out, though, is a mystery to me.

Allen has more to say about Saladin Ahmed's nomination here. The full ballot, including the Bradbury and Norton Awards, can be found here.

Short Story

Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela, Saladin Ahmed (Clockwork Phoenix, 2, Norilana Press, Jul09)
I Remember the Future, Michael A. Burstein (Apex Press, Nov08)
Non-Zero Probabilities, N. K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld, Nov09)
Spar, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, Oct09)
Going Deep, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's Science Fiction, Jun09)
Bridesicle, Will McIntosh (Asimov's Science Fiction, Jan09)

Novelette

The Gambler, Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2, Pyr Books, Oct08)
Vinegar Peace, or the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage, Michael Bishop (Asimov's Science Fiction, Jul08)
I Needs Must Part, The Policeman Said, Richard Bowes (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dec09)
Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast, Eugie Foster (Interzone, Jan/Feb09)
Divining Light, Ted Kosmatka (Asimov's Science Fiction, Aug08)
A Memory of Wind, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com, Nov09)

Novella

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean Press, Jun09)
Arkfall, Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sep09)
Act One, Nancy Kress (Asimov's Science Fiction, Mar09)
Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon, Feb09)
Sublimation Angels, Jason Sanford (Interzone, Sep/Oct09)
The God Engines, John Scalzi (The God Engines, Subterranean Press, Dec09)