American novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood has won the £20,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for her “searingly witty and innovative take on modern day internet culture”. Read more
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For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz’s novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance. Read more
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The Prize honors a mid-career author of fiction “who has earned a distinguished reputation and the widespread praise of readers and reviewers” and grants a $50,000 award to support current and future work. Read more
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Christos Ikonomou will be the first recipient of the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, a new, annual international mid-career award for exceptional writers. Ikonomou was born in 1970 in Athens, and is the author of four collections of short fiction… Read more
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The National Book Foundation has released its annual list of the “5 Under 35,” a group of five fiction writers under the age of 35 “whose debut work promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape.” Read more
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Alameddine, a Lebanese American whose other works include the National Book Award finalist “An Unnecessary Woman,” will receive $15,000. Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Karen Joy Fowler are among the previous PEN/Faulkner winners. Read more
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…tightly constructed and spectacularly mind-bending stories that ingeniously pair everyday challenges and outlandish predicaments, ranging from hilarious to terrifying. Folk writes with unnerving matter-of-factness as she veers into Poe- and Shirley Jackson-like horror or turns to the poignantly fantastic in the mode of George Saunders or Kelly Link … Folk’s shocking, grim, funny, and tender stories deliver astringently incisive perceptions of human longing and contradictions. Read more
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… a profound and very funny book about growth and promise, and how not to kill them off; about women reading and writing and how they survive. Read more
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Kirby’s book succeeds not just because she’s a preternaturally gifted prose stylist, but because of her willingness to take risks. She experiments with points of view and occasionally dips into metafiction (“Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” is a master class in storytelling, as well as a hilarious commentary on a fiction scene that’s seen men overrepresented for decades.) And yet she also knows when to tap the brakes, when to step back and let her carefully drawn characters speak for themselves. It’s a stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless. Read more
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The book doesn’t feel speculative so much as inevitable, which is all the more horrifying. In fact, although the book isn’t billed as a horror novel, I felt consistently spooked while reading, disturbed but propelled on by Chan’s excellent pacing . Read more
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