Our Medalist for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Ursula K. Le Guin takes the stage. #ScienceFiction #Fantasy #Legends #authors #writers #literature #books #NBAwards
Tomorrow at 9 a.m. EDT, we’re releasing the names of our 2015 5 Under 35 Honorees through an exclusive partnership with BuzzFeed Books!
In recognition of the program’s 10 years of honoring promising young writers, we invited 5 previous Honorees to make this year’s selections.
Look out for the announcement tomorrow. And click here to learn more.
We in the book community are in the middle of a sustained conversation about diversity. We talk about our need for diverse books with diverse characters written by diverse writers. I wholeheartedly agree.
But I have noticed an undercurrent of fear in many of our discussions. We’re afraid of writing characters different from ourselves because we’re afraid of getting it wrong. We’re afraid of what the Internet might say.
This fear can be a good thing if it drives us to do our homework, to be meticulous in our cultural research. But this fear crosses the line when we become so intimidated that we quietly make choices against stepping out of our own identities.
After all, our job as writers is to step out of ourselves, and to encourage our readers to do the same.
We hosted a fantastic 5 Under 35 reunion reading at the AWP conference in LA last weekend, featuring eight remarkable writers recognized by our emerging writers program. We asked each of them to share a piece of advice they found helpful as emerging writers, and we’ve complied them all below.
Artists are sophisticated impostors – like writers.
Valeria Luiselli, a 5 Under 35 Honoree and author of The Story of My Teeth.
On June 20, you can watch Luiselli play basketball with award-winning writers and publishing powerhouses. Tickets are $25 ($30 at the door), and proceeds will support BookUp, a reading program for students in low-income communities. Get your tickets now!
A handful of poets have been twice-honored with #NBAwards for Poetry, but Alan Dugan is the only poet to be honored for both his first and last collections of #poetry. His first collection, simply titled Poems, won the #NBAward for Poetry in 1962, as well as many other honors. His last collection, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, published at age 78, won the #NBAward in 2001. Writing for our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for Poetry, poet and critic Katie Peterson says Dugan’s poem are often described as “tough talking” and “urban.” But if Dugan’s poems are hard on others as well as himself ( “an aging phony, stale, woozy, and corrupt /from unattempted dreams and bad health habits.”), the pain is worth the pleasure. Dugan, says Peterson,“writes love poems where intimacy has all the brutality and wordlessness of animal instinct…His lines are tense and govern expectation by making you so pleasurably anxious you feel compelled to continue to read.”
“In interviews, you can sense how frayed she sometimes was: as if, with politics, and being a mom, and writing, her life was cluttered with too many good things.”
– 5 Under 35-Honoree Molly Antopol pays tribute to Grace Paley—a National Book Award-Finalist who taught her how to write about politics without writing “Political Fiction"—in The Atlantic’s "By Heart” series.
Illustration by Doug McLean
In the process of writing your book, what did you discover, what, if anything, surprised you?
Steve Sheinkin (Young People’s Literature): In researching the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers I learned about an incident I think is truly shocking, even in the context of a story full of secrets and lies. With the 1968 election approaching, Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, successfully undermined peace talks aimed at ending the war. Just days before the election, the talks were finally making progress, and Nixon feared a peace deal would rob him of his best issue – the Democrats’ failure in Vietnam. So Nixon secretly urged the president of South Vietnam to refuse to go to Paris for talks, promising that, if elected, he’d be a better friend to the South than Democrats had been. It worked – and the talks stalled again. And the most incredible part was that Lyndon Johnson knew all about it, thanks to wiretaps and intercepted cables! He privately (and, I’d argue, accurately) called it “treason,” but wasn’t sure he wanted to shock the world days before an election. So it was just one more secret from the American people.
Seated atop a throne of books, LeVar Burton, of Reading Rainbow and host of our 2015 5 Under 35 ceremony, reads the 11 of the most beautiful sentences in literature.
This week, we were thrilled to announce the Longlists for the 2019 National Book Awards. These titles in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature represent some of the best writing of the year. The Finalists will be announced October 8, all in the lead up to the 70th National Book Awards on November 20.
alwaysbringabookwithyou
all-these-paperback-dreams
Barnes and Nobles is gonna start serving food and alcohol.
Everybody’s cracking jokes about how it’s a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of Amazon.
But you know what? Props to them. This is exactly what Blockbuster didn’t do. At no point was Blockbuster like “Hey, movie rentals aren’t the lucrative enterprise they once were. Perhaps it’s time we become known for our cheesy garlic bread.”
that’s a fantastic plan, honestly? i would 100% go sit at a bookshop, buy a glass of wine, and pick up the newest biography. 50/50 i’d decide to buy it after a couple chapters, and even if i don’t, that’s still money i spent at B&N!
They could host book clubs with food and drinks where one of the employees shares their experiences with a book of their choice and tries to convince the guests to buy it.
Barnes and noble realizing the only reason people go to brick and mortar stores is for the experience and access to an enjoyable physical space they can socialize in (sure isnt for the price) and capitalizing on that is a stroke of genius and a really refreshing approach to the dilemma of competing with online stores
