NYPL Young Lions Announcement
Every year, the New York Public Library & Ethan Hawke award $25k to a writer under 35 based on a book she published the previous year. Here’s the full press release. Here is this year’s list:
Citrus County by John Brandon (McSweeney’s)
Vida by Patricia Engel (Grove Press)
The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)
Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton & Company)
Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (Harper Perennial)
What do you think about this list? What have you read on this list? Who “deserves” it? Who’s missing? What was your favorite book published in 2010 written by a writer under 35?
SMILES YOU CAN’T STOP: Winners
Pumpkins have long since rotted, and Massachusetts is trying to convince us that thirty-degree sunlight passes for bloomage. Which must mean the winners of the unstoppable smiles pumpkin caption contest are: Jeremy Bauer, Ted Powers, and Noah Falck. I know I said I’d only pick two, but I liked all three of their captions. Thanks to Ken Baumann for sponsoring the contest by accidentally buying two copies of Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable. Winners, email me at mikeayoung AT gmail DOT com with your mailing addresses to get your free books. Everybody else: the kid is bobbing for apples, not puking, but you shouldn’t let that stop you.
SMILES YOU CAN’T STOP: Win a Free Book
So Ken Baumann (author of the forthcoming Solip from Tyrant Books in 2012; congrats Ken!) accidentally bought two copies of Jason Bredle’s heart-sifting and twisting Smiles of the Unstoppable. When I offered to refund the extra money, he generously suggested I give the extra copy away on HTMLGIANT, which brings us to the pumpkin below this paragraph. See, I wanted to do a caption contest where I posted a picture of Ken smiling, but for some reason I found this picture of a pumpkin, which was actually even better than a picture of Ken getting Lasik surgery.
Here’s the contest: Post a caption to this pumpkin smile picture in the comments. Best 2 captions win copies of Smiles of the Unstoppable. Deadline: next Friday, March 25th. Very easy. Bonus points if Ken/Jason are somehow involved in an adventure with the pumpkin. See the picture, amplify your best/Jimmy Cheniest wit, and win some terrific poetry. Also you can go see Jason Bredle read at the Tucson Lit Press Fest on the 26th of March. So my best suggestion is to win this book, read some poems from it to your rich lover, and have your rich lover swoon so hard they buy you a ticket to Tucson. Duh. Very easy. Ready set go. If you need further convincing, read Jason’s poem “Moby Dick” below the jump, originally published at Ken’s No Posit. READ MORE >
Try + Mechanics Giveaway
Try by Dennis Cooper and The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher are up for grabs. These are courtesy of the super talented & friendly Joel Westendorf, whose photography and design work are wow. Email satorpress (at google’s mail thing) your address and I’ll pick one winner for each. NOW CLOSED.
Share Your Shittiest Love Story, Win a Free Copy of J.A. Tyler’s New Book!!!
This is a man being so much other than.
How the love falls out of him, replaced by beads, by water, by nails, by cardboard.
Bent on a curb, blowing kisses to dead lips in that window above, a voice calling out a name, her not looking down at the wreckage.
A man when there is none left.
This is a love poem, a love poem that doesn’t want to be, a love poem about shattering open, about groping for what is left when there is nothing left, when subsistence isn’t enough, when we are damaged and the memories of what was, are all that is.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day & the forthcoming publication of J.A. Tyler’s second book, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed (now available for pre-order from Fugue State Press) publisher James Chapman has kindly offered to give away a free advanced copy of the book to one lucky HTMLGIANT reader who shares their shittiest love story in the comment thread to this post. The contest is open between now and Valentine’s day. On the 14th, J.A. Tyler will select the winning comment/story.
NBCC finalists 2010
Any surprises? Anything here you want to read but haven’t? Anything here you read but wish you didn’t. (Matt Bell has one that I know of!) [NOTE: I didn’t mean that I wish I hadn’t read Matt’s book. I am very happy to have read it. I meant he’s reading a book on this list and may or may not wish – see comments below – he wasn’t.] Do you care about prizes, or are they just dumb? A creative writing professor once told that the only people who really care about prizes are the other people who give out prizes, meaning: prizes neither reflect the “goodness” of the writing nor do they impact sales, etc., BUT one prize often leads to another prize leads to another prize, and on and on. [Full press release here.]
Fiction
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf
Jonathan Franzen. Freedom. Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
David Grossman, To The End Of The Land. Knopf.
Hans Keilson.Comedy In A Minor Key. Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. Faber & Faber.
DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!! (A Holiday recommendation)
My first college roommate had a bookshelf filled with those big-format subculture guidebooks: The Trouser Press Record Guide, The Psychotronic Video Guide to Film, High Weirdness by Mail, the RE/SEARCH publications. I had been a normal kid in junior high, and began going weird in high school when my family moved to a small town. I had had to connect to all my weirdness through a couple of old issues of Thrasher, a couple of issues of MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL, and a single copy of Flipside that I bought from the local record store. (I think they had ordered it in by mistake. It looked out of place next to Hit Parader and Kerrang!) Needful to say, probably, when I was a teenager, we plugged our home computer into the wall and into a printer, but couldn’t even conceive of plugging it into a phone jack. READ MORE >
Adam Robinson—
Enter the Beecher’s poetry and fiction contest and win $500. Judges are Deb Olin Unferth for fiction and Adam Robinson (me) for poetry.
1