Orange Prize for Fiction goes to Madeline Miller

The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded to the American writer Madeline Miller for her novel "The Song of Achilles."

"The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman."

Previous winners of the Orange Prize for fiction

Retold Tales - recommended books for adults (from NoveList database)

Pulitzer Prizes

The Pulitzer Prize Winners 2012 have been announced. Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded at a luncheon ceremony at Columbia University in May.  

Background Info on the award process

Biography of Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911)

Biography/Autobiography

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis (The Penguin Press) 

"An engaging portrait of a globetrotting diplomat whose complicated life was interwoven with the Cold War and America’s emergence as the world’s dominant power."
previous Biography/Autobiography winners

General Nonfiction
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton & Company)
"A provocative book arguing that an obscure work of philosophy, discovered nearly 600 years ago, changed the course of history by anticipating the science and sensibilities of today."

 previous General Nonfiction winners

History

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the late Manning Marable (Viking)

"An exploration of the legendary life and provocative views of one of the most significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and tragic.
 previous History winners

Poetry
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)

"A collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain."
previous Poetry winners







Fiction
No prize for Fiction was awarded this year. For a list of previous winners with links to our online catalog click here.

Julie Otsuka wins 2012 PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction

Julie Otsuka won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel "The Buddha in the Attic". The book's publisher is Alfred A. Knopf. It was chosen from more than 350 novels and short-story collections by American authors which were published in 2011. Ms. Otsuka will receive $15,000. The awards ceremony will take place May 5 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. "The Buddha in the Attic" is about the lives of Japanese mail-order brides who come to San Francisco in the early 20th century. Julie Otsuka was born in 1962 and is a native of California.

Books by Julie Otsuka in our collection
Information about the winner and the finalists

The four finalists are:

Lost Memory of Skin. By Russell Banks

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. By Don Delillo

The Artist of Disappearance. By Anita Desai












 We Others: New and selected stories. By Steven Millhauser

And the Oscars go to ... books!

The 84th annual Academy Awards Ceremony will honor the best films of 2011. It will take place on Sunday, February, 26, 2012 at the Kodak Theatre in the heart of historic Hollywood, California. But the real winners this year are books! Eleven literary adaptations received recognition in major award categories. Six out of the nine best picture nominations are based on books. Cinema depends on literature, on the written word. Woody Allen's original screenplay for "Midnight in Paris" is a love declaration for the literary world of T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Don't just see the movies, read the books! Click on the book title for a link to our catalog, the statewide catalog, or worldcat.org.

Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game. By Michael Lewis. (This author also wrote the source for the movie Blind Side)

"Explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money."

My Week with Marilyn. By Colin Clark.

"Presents the author's diary accounts of the week he, an assistant on the set of the movie "The Prince and the Showgirl," bonded with Marilyn Monroe after she escaped the high-pressure set and toured the English countryside with him."

War Horse. By Michael Morpurgo.


"Joey the horse recalls his experiences growing up on an English farm, his struggle for survival as a cavalry horse during World War I, and his reunion with his beloved master."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. By John Le Carré.

"Who is the mole buried within British intelligence, planted by Karla in Moscow years ago? George Smiley is back, in the first novel of The quest for Karla trilogy."

Albert Nobbs: a novella. By George Moore.

"Long out of print, George Moore's classic novella returns just in time for the major motion picture starring Glenn Close as a woman disguised as a man in nineteenth-century Ireland."

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. By Jonathan Safran Foer.


"Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind."

The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher. By John Campbell.

"Traces the life of Britain's only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, from her upbringing in Grantham to her unexpected challenge to Edward Heath for leadership of the Conservative party and her eventual removal from power."

The Descendants. By Kaui Hart Hemmings.

"A descendant of royalty and one of the largest landowners in Hawaii, Matthew King struggles to deal with his out-of-control daughters--ten-year-old Scottie and seventeen-year-old Alex--as well as his comatose wife, whom they are about to remove from life
support."

The Invention of Hugo Cabaret: a novel in words and pictures. By Brian Selznick.

"When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a mysterious toyseller and his goddaughter, his undercover life and his biggest secret are jeopardized."

The Help. By Kathryn Stockett.

"In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another."

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. By Stieg Larsson.

"Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate."

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National Book Awards

At the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony yesterday evening in New York City, the following awards were presented: Poet John Ashbery received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International, received the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community.

National Book Award for Fiction



Salvage the Bones
By Ward, Jesmyn
Bloomsbury Publishing

National Book Award for Nonfiction



The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
By Greenblatt, Stephen
W. W. Norton & Company
interview

National Book Award for Poetry
Head Off & Split: Poems
By Finney, Nikky
Triquarterly Books
interview

National Book Award for Young People's Literature

Inside Out & Back Again

By Lai, Thanhha
Harper
interview

Audiobook Appreciation Month

June is Audiobook Appreciation Month.

New Audiobooks in the Library

Downloadable Audiobooks

Audiobook Award Winners

Keith Richard: LIFE , read by Johnny Depp & Joe Hurley, featuring Keith Richards, is the "Audiobook of the Year" winner.

Orange Prize for Fiction

The Serbian-American author Téa Obreht won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel THE TIGER'S WIFE.
The award is given annually for the best novel in English by a woman and comes with about $49,000. Téa Obreht is the youngest winner of the Orange Prize. She is 25 years old.

"Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia and raised in Belgrade. In 1992 her family moved to Cyprus and then to Egypt, where she learned to speak and read English, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her MFA in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009."

Previous Winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction

Philip Roth wins Man Booker International Prize

Philip Roth is the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize. He was chosen from a list of 13 eminent contenders.

"The Man Booker International Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage. It is presented once every two years to a living author for a body of work published either originally in English or widely available in translation in the English language. It has previously been awarded to Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009."

Books by Philip Roth in our library
Movie based on a novel by Philip Roth
Information on Philip Roth and his novels in NoveList Plus database

2011 James Beard Foundation Book Awards

The following cookbook authors received awards from The James Beard Foundation:

American Cooking
James Villas
Pig: King of the Southern Table


Cookbook Hall of Fame

Harold McGee

On Food and Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen


Cookbook of the Year
Diana Kennedy
Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy

Reference and Scholarship
Mark Bitterman
Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral with Recipes

Single Subject
James Peterson
Meat: A Kitchen Education

Healthy Focus
Jessie Price
The Simple Art of Eatingwell


Baking and Dessert
Kim Boyce
Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours

General Cooking
Amanda Hesser
The Essential New York Times Cook Book: Classic Recipes for a New Century

International
Grace Young
Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery with Authentic Recipes and Stories

Writing and Literature
Paul Greenberg
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

Best Chef: New York City
Gabrielle Hamilton
Blood, Bones and Butter

Best Chef: Southeast
Andrea Reusing
Cooking in the Moment

Cooking from a Professional Point of View +
Photography
Redzepi, René
Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine

Beverage
Jordan Mackay and Rajat Parr
Secrets of the Sommeliers: How to Think and Drink like the Worlds' Top Wine Professionals

Deborah Eisenberg wins 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Deborah Eisenberg won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her work THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DEBORAH EISENBERG (Picador). The honored book combines four volumes of Eisenberg's work: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. Twilight of the Superheroes was a PEN/Faulkner finalist in 2007.

Deborah Eisenberg was born in 1945, and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. She went to boarding school and to college in Vermont, and in the 1960s moved to New York City where she received her B.A. at the New School. She now teaches at the University of Virginia.

The PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest peer juried-prize for fiction in the United States. Three judges considered about 320 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2010 calendar year. As winner, Eisenberg receives $15,000. One of the judges, Laura Furman says, "From the first to the last of her collected stories, Deborah Eisenberg demonstrates her sharp intelligence, literary inventiveness, and her clear understanding of human interconnectedness as it exists in isolation." Each of the four finalists, Jennifer Egan for A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (Knopf), Jaimy Gordon for LORD OF MISRULE (McPherson & Co.), Eric Puchner for MODEL HOME (Scribner), and Brad Watson for ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES (W.W. Norton) receives $5,000.

National Book Critics Circle Awards

The National Book Critics Circle is a group of more than 600 professional reviewers. Last Thursday they presented awards which "honor the best literature published in English in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry".

Fiction
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Review by Colette Bancroft

Nonfiction
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
a book about the history of black migration from the American South

Autobiography
Half a Life by Darin Strauss
The author killed a girl riding her bike with his car when he was a teenager.
Review by Karen Long

Biography
How to Live: Or a life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell.
Review by Steven G. Kellman

Poetry
One With Others by C.D. Wright
Review by Craig Morgan Teicher

Criticism
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh
Review by Stephen Burt

National Book Award Winners 2010

The National Book Award Winners for 2010 are:

Fiction
Jaimy Gordon: Lord of Misrule
Interview with Author


Nonfiction
Patti Smith: Just Kids
Interview with Author

Poetry
Terrance Hayes: Lighthead
Interview with Author

Young People's Literature
Kathryn Erskine: Mockingbird
Interview with Author

Nominees for National Book Awards announced

Thirteen female authors are included in the twenty finalists for the 2010 National Book Awards - the largest number ever.

Finalists for Fiction

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Finalists for Nonfiction

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group)

John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq
(W.W. Norton & Co/The New Press )

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
(Doubleday)

Finalists for Poetry

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)

James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)

C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)

Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Finalists for Young People's Literature

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)

Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
(Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)

Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)

Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

The winners in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult literature will be announced on
Nov. 17.

Howard Jacobson wins Man Booker Prize

The Man Book Prize 2010 was awarded to Howard Jacobson, 68, for his comic novel "The Finkler Question".

Britain's most prestigious literary award is given each year to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. It comes with a check for about $80,000 and a big increase in book sales and publicity.

Howard Jacobson on taking comic novels seriously
(article in THE GUARDIAN, Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010)

Synopsis of THE FINKLER QUESTION and brief author bio

Previous Booker Prize Winners

Mario Vargas Llosa - Nobel Literature Prize 2010

The Peruvian writer and author Mario Vargas Llosa, 74, has won the 2010 Nobel Literature Prize.

Books by Mario Vargas Llosa in the library

Article in the New York Times, Oct. 8, 2010

Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a leading literary British award. On September 7, 2010 a shortlist of six authors was announced from a longlist of 13 authors. The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday, October 12. The selections for the shortlist 2010 are:

Australian author Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Irish author Emma Donoghue for Room (Picador - Pan Macmillan)

South African author Damon Galgut for In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books - Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy for The Long Song (Headline Review - Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy for C (Jonathan Cape - Random House)

Previous winners of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Geraldine Brooks wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize

The author Geraldine Brooks is the recipient of the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Brooks, 54, covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. She received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel "March".

Books by Geraldine Brooks in our library

Article by Julie Bosman, published in the New York Times, Aug. 19, 2010