Content Tagged ‘National Book Awards’

Welcome to another Friday! We’ve been busy at work on production for our Sound issue of Ecotone, and wanted to share some good noise with you this week.

Lookout author Steve Almond along with cohost Cheryl Strayed celebrated the one-year anniversary of Dear Sugar radio this week! If you haven’t listened to this podcast, do so posthaste. Always moving and thought-provoking, these two make a fabulous pair.

In Honey from the Lion news, author Matthew Neill Null had some fun in Third Man Record’s 1947 Voice-o-Graph booth this week. He read the first two minutes of his book along with impromptu guitar backing by Porter Meadors. Then the machine pressed the 6″ phonograph disc immediately. Here’s some video of the playback. As Matt says, “nice and crackly.”

LitChat posted a lovely review of Honey from the Lion this week: “It’s as if he sets up an old view camera and stands behind it, head beneath the black cloth, allowing, or perhaps conjuring, the slow seep of images. At times hard to see and even harder to unsee once they form, Null’s imagery and turns of phrase are beautiful, sharp, and keenly rendered.”

You know what else sounds good? Book awards, and new books.

Finalists for the National Book Award include books by contributors Karen E. Bender, Lauren Groff, and Patrick Phillips! Stephanie Trott, one of our poetry editors, interviewed  Lauren Groff for The Rumpus. Stephanie and Lauren talk about how words sound, prompting this lovely quote from Stephanie, “But sometimes those words are so delicious that you have to speak them aloud and wonder how we don’t use them on a daily basis.”

Ecotone contributor Ana Maria Spagna’s new book, Reclaimers, is out. It tells the story of how members of the Mountain Maidu tribe attempted to reclaim the Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to them, from the grip of a utility company. 

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, whose work will appear in our forthcoming Sound issue, has a first book out from Texas Review Press. Winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, the poems in Inked chart a departure and a return.

That’s all for this week! We hope your weekend is full of joyful noise and the sounds of beautiful words.

It’s been a big book awards week, no? Hearty congratulations to all the authors on the National Book Awards longlists, but especially to Lookout’s debut author Edith Pearlman, of whom we’re forever fans. (A toast to her editor and Lookout’s co-founder, Ben George, as well!) We’re also thrilled to see books by members of our hometown team selected–congrats are in order for Wilmingtonians Karen E. Bender and Michael White. And two Ecotone contributors to boot: Lauren Groff (whose beautiful story “Abundance” appears in our Ecotone anthology, Astoria to Zion) and Patrick Phillips. Hooray, all of you!

Around the net, we saw Camille T. Dungy featured on Poets.org’s Poem-a-Day and Claire Vaye Watkins’s story “Wasteland, Wasteland, Wasteland” as Kenyon Review’s story of the week.

Our debut novelist, Matthew Neill Null (seen here signing a book for beloved author Pat Conroy) has been super busy this week touring all around North and South Carolina–supported by grant funding from South Arts–including visits to the Hawbridge school in Saxapahaw where he faced down 320 elementary and high school students, and the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines where he talked about writing historical fiction. Thanks so much to the bookstores that hosted and supported Matt this week, the best of the best around the Carolinas: Scuppernog, Malaprop’s, Flyleaf, the Country Bookshop, Fiction Addiction, Hub City, and Main Street Books. We’re so grateful to have fantastic and gracious stores to send our writers to.

We’re also thrilled that Kirkus Reviews included Honey from the Lion in Nine Books You Shouldn’t Overlook, and loved to hear Matt over the airwaves on The State of Things. He was a little hoarse, but understandably so after this crazy week.

Matt and staff from Lookout are headed this weekend to the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show in Raleigh, and can’t wait to meet and talk with owners from some of our favorite bookstores in the South. We hope, as ours will be, your weekends are filled with lots of books and scavenger hunts!

It’s hard to believe that just two weeks ago we were celebrating Writers’ Week and helping our sister magazine, Ecotone, launch the fall Sustenance issue with a farm-to-table supper in partnership with Feast Down East. The delicious meal was served under a full moon and glowing lights in the Kenan Hall courtyard. Thanks again to contributors Alison Hawthorne Deming and Randall Kenan, as well as Leslie Hossfeld and Stefan Hartmann of Black River Organic Farm, for speaking. If you missed it, you can enjoy a taste of the evening in this album, courtesy of UNCW’s Will Page.

The new Sustenance issue of Ecotone is now on newsstands and available via the website, but don’t forget to pick a copy of the Spring/Summer 2014 issue, featuring a story by Lookout’s next author, Matthew Neill Null, while you’re at it.

After a long hiatus, we’re finally back with our weekly Lit News Roundup.

Hearty congratulations are in order for several Ecotone contributors:

Shawn Vestal recently won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for his story collection, Godforsaken Idaho, and we couldn’t be prouder that two of the stories in the book, “Winter Elders” and “Opposition In All Things,” first appeared in the pages of Ecotone. “Winter Elders” also has a home in our best of Ecotone fiction anthology, Astoria to Zion.

And Ecotone 16 contributor Molly Antopol’s stunning story collection, The UnAmericans, made the 2014 longlist for the National Book Award in Fiction. You can read “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” in full on the Ecotone website.

Congratulations to this year’s National Book Foundation, National Book Awards 5 Under 35 honorees. Stuart Nadler, author of The Book of Life (Reagan Arthur/Back Bay Books, 2011), was selected by our own Edith Pearlman, Fiction Finalist for Binocular Vision, 2011.

One of the three interns invited to share in Edith Pearlman’s success at the National Book Awards this year, Arianne Beros wrote a featured article for Wilmington’s Star News.

Once we were settled in her office, Emily took a deep breath, pressed her hands together, and said, “We’re taking you with us to the National Book Awards ceremony.”

We were so stunned that no one spoke for a few seconds. What an incredible, unexpected opportunity.

Read the entire article here!