Today at the opening of the International Literature Festival Dublin, Dublin’s Lord Mayor Hazel Chu announced that Valeria Luiselli has won the 2021 Dublin Literary Award for Lost Children Archive, her first English-language novel. At €100,000, the award is the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English. Read more
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Somerset’s Combe Florey House, once the family home of Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon, is finally for sale—and it’s pretty spectacular, looking onto parkland and water. The grounds include a twelve-bedroom home with red sandstone facades; a pool and pool house; a tennis court; several outbuildings; and a party barn, which I’ve just learned is a glamorous barn you throw parties in. … The house is currently on sale for $7.6 million, so consider making the purchase if you’re a Waugh fan with money to spare—or if you have some ideas for barn parties. Read more
Last evening in a virtual ceremony, Raven Leilani was awarded the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize—an annual £20,000 prize given to the best literary English-language work by an author aged 39 or under—for her debut novel Luster. Read more
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Need a secluded getaway with writerly flair? Have $11.5 million on hand? You’re in luck: Amagansett Windmill House, famously occupied by Arthur Miller, is finally up for sale after years of temporary renting.
Windmill House, built as a functioning windmill in the 1950s, was renovated and converted into a living space a century later by Samuel Rubin, founder of Fabergé cosmetics; now, it’s a two-bedroom, one-bath house, with an adjoining studio and two-car garage. It’s located on 5.5 acres of land, suitable for property expansion—or just a nature-shrouded experience. Read more
As India’s horrific COVID surge intensifies, a group of authors from around the world (led by the narrative nonfiction writer Sonia Faleiro) have come together to support the essential work of Mission Oxygen India, an organization dedicated to helping hospitals across the country get immediate access to direly-needed oxygen concentrators. Read more
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, has won The New Literacy Project’s annual Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a $50,000 award that recognizes “a midcareer fiction writer who has earned a distinguished reputation and the approbation and gratitude of readers.” Read more
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This evening, in a virtual ceremony, the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of its 2021 Whiting Awards, which seek to “recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” These ten writers, working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, will each be awarded $50,000, prize money that the Whiting Foundation hopes will allow them to “devote themselves full-time to their own writing or to take bold new risks in their work.” Past Whiting Award winners include Colson Whitehead, Anne Boyer, Ocean Vuong, Mary Karr, Lydia Davis, Layli Long Soldier, Denis Johnson, Terrance Hayes, Ling Ma, Sigrid Nunez, and many others.
The 2021 Whiting Award winners are:
Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat (Fiction)
Tope Folarin, author of A Particular Kind of Black Man (Fiction)
Joshua Bennett, author of Being Property Once Myself (Nonfiction and Poetry)
Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (Nonfiction)
Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species (Poetry)
Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden (Poetry)
Xandria Phillips, author of Hull (Poetry)
Jordan E. Cooper, author of Black Boy Fly (Drama)
Donnetta Lavinia Grays, author of Where We Stand (Drama)
Sylvia Khoury, author of Selling Kabul (Drama)
Even in boomtimes it is hard to keep a bookstore afloat: the margins are razor thin and you’re in constant competition for bookbuyers with the largest monopoly in the universe (Am*zon). This is why a lot of stores—particularly newer ones—build higher-margin sidelines into their business models… like, say… beer! (Alena Jones recently wrote for Lit Hub about what bookselling means in the context of selling everything but books.)
Well, I’m here to tell you about a bookstore in New York City that has boldly—zestily, even—gone with pickles as its main sideline. Sweet Pickle Books, conveniently located in the pickle Mecca of the Lower East Side, is your one-stop destination for used books, old cassette tapes(?), and two-pound jars of pickles. Read more
