1/6/09 - Reif Larsen, whose first novel, THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET, will be published by Penguin Press in the U.S. and by Harvill Secker in the U.K. in May 2009, has been invited to attend the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, sponsored by The Guardian. The Hay Festival, which runs from May 21st-31st, is an annual literary event that attracts around 80,000 visitors. Past writers in attendance include Ian McEwan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie and Mary Gaitskill.
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11/25/08 - Ehud Havazelet’s BEARING THE BODY is selected as this year’s winner of The Ken Kesey Award for Fiction in The 2008 Oregon Book Awards. It was previously named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2007 and won The Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
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10/8/08 - An essay titled “Cricket Fighting,” by Hugh Raffles, is selected for inclusion in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2008, published by Houghton Mifflin. The essay will be published in his forthcoming book, INSECTOPEDIA (Pantheon Books).
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 6/23/08 - HBO options the rights to Sloane Crosley’s New York Times bestselling book of essays, I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE. Carolyn Strauss will serve as executive producer on the series.
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5/1/08 - The American Society of Magazine Editors announces Paige Williams as the winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for her article, “You Have Thousands of Angels Around You,” published in Atlanta Magazine. She is currently working on her first novel.
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3/12/08 - The American Academy of Arts & Letters announces Ben Marcus as the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, a biennial award that recognizes outstanding writing that is progressive and original.
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 3/4/08 - Film rights to the title story from Karen Russell’s ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES have been optioned to Dino DeLaurentiis Company.
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2/21/08 - Karen Russell’s story, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” first published in Zoetrope All-Story has been selected for inclusion in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie.
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2/10/08 - Francine Prose was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award for her article “Religion Found” in Saveur Magazine. She has also been honored with the 2008 Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature in recognition of her career as one of our nation’s most distinguished literary voices. This prestigious award for literature has only been given twice before, to Eudora Welty and Alice Munro.
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1/4/2008 - Aryn Kyle’s THE GOD OF ANIMALS wins a 2008 Book Award from The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Other winners include Sherman Alexie, Jim Harrison, Denis Johnson and Lauren Kessler.
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12/02/07 -
The New York Times Book Review issued its list of 100
Notable Books of the Year, naming both BEARING THE BODY by
Ehud Havazelet and VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE by
Lydia Davis.
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 10/10/07 - VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE, Lydia Davis’s collection of
short stories, is named one of five finalists for the National
Book Award. The New York Times
described the book as "haunting, dreamlike and yet indisputably
real."
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 10/05/07
- Karen Russell appears at the 2007 New
Yorker Festival Fiction Night, reading alongside Jonathan Lethem. Fiction
Night is an annual evening of paired readings by writers whose
stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and
conversations between writers on the themes that feature in
their work.
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 09/19/07 - The film adaptation of Stephen McCauley’s novel TRUE
ENOUGH was released a week ago by A4 Films in
France. Directed by Academy Award-winning director Sam Karmann,
"La Vérité ou Presque" was the highest grossing French film in
its first week of its release. It is McCauley’s second novel to
have a life in film, as 20th Century Fox released THE
OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION in 1998.
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 09/12/07
- The Mercantile Library Center for
Fiction announces that Ehud Havazelet’s acclaimed
first novel BEARING THE BODY, published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux in August, is one of seven finalists for its 2007
John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.
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 08/24/07 - Karen Russell’s
novel ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES is long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. The award is
dedicated to “spotting and advancing new writing talent” and
carries a prize of £10,000.
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 06/04/07 - The Glorious
Ones, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's new musical about
theatre history's major players, will be staged at Lincoln
Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse in 2007-08, Variety reported.
The play opens on November 5, 2007.
The musical traces the
lives of commedia dell'arte troupers in the 1600s, and is
inspired by a novel by Francine Prose first published in
1974.
Graciela Daniele, who
directed and choreographed the show's world premiere this spring
at Pittsburgh Public Theater, will repeat her duties. She staged
and choreographed Ahrens and Flaherty's Dessa Rose at the
Newhouse, and has been a frequent A&F collaborator (Ragtime,
for example). A&F's My Favorite Year and A Man of No
Importance were also produced by Lincoln Center Theater, at
the Broadway Beaumont and Off-Broadway Newhouse, respectively.
HarperCollins plans to reissue the Prose novel to coincide with
the Lincoln Center premiere.
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 02/16/07
- The new lineup for the 2007 BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
anthology is announced, and guest editor Stephen King has chosen “St.
Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” the title story of
Karen Russell’s 2006 short story collection, and Aryn Kyle's
"Allegiance," which was originally published in Ploughshares
Magazine.
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 02/06/07
- Granta Magazine anoints twenty-one under-35 literary stars as
the 21 Best of Young American Novelists. Gary Shteyngart,
author of ABSURDISTAN and
THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK, and Karen Russell,
author of ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES are among
the winners. As noted on www.Granta.com, the
honor is meant to distinguish “a new
generation of American writing which shows, beside its talent,
what bothers and inspires the imagination of modern America.”
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 12/10/06
- The
New York Times Book Review declares Gary Shteyngart’s ABSURDISTAN one
of its Ten Best Books of 2006, calling it “smart, funny and, in
the end, extraordinarily rich and moving.” The book was also
named one of the best books of the year by Time, the Washington
Post Book World, San Francisco
Chronicle, Chicago
Tribune, The Seattle Times, and Rocky
Mountain News.
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