Month: March 2005

Junot Diaz, whom I adore and admire, will be reading at Disney Hall tonight in Los Angeles. You know I’d be there if I still lived in L.A., so please check him out and report back to me so I can do some vicarious living.

The finalists for storySouth’s Million Writers’ Award have been announced. They are:

• Terry Bisson “Super 8” (Scifiction.com)
• Jai Clare “Bone on Bone” (Agni)
• Xujun Eberlein “Second Encounter” (Paumanok Review)
• Alicia Gifford “Toggling the Switch” (Narrative Magazine)
• Richard Grayson “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn” (Fiction Warehouse)
• Trebor Healey “The Mercy Seat” (Blithe House Quarterly)
• Dave Housley “Ryan Seacrest Is Famous” (Barrelhouse)
• Joan Shaddox Isom “Remade Tobacco” (Eclectica Magazine)
• Corey Mesler “Madame Sabat’s Grave” (Pindeldyboz)
• Chika Unigwe “Dreams” (Eclectica Magazine)

Please take the time to read these fine stories, and then vote for your favorite here.

“I know it seems like a contradiction in terms for a book to be an underappreciated award winner, but that is exactly the case for Break Any Woman Down by Dana Johnson,” Jones says. “This gorgeous short collection gives Dana Johnson the distinction of being the first African American woman to win the Flannery O’Connor Prize. (In 2001, can you believe it took so long?) The dozen or so stories in this collection show Johnson’s incredible range– the characters span from a twelve year old trying to sort out what it means to be the only black kid in her suburban school to a Los Angeles stripper struggling to convince her porn-star boyfriend that she is a good person. Dana Johnson gives us wit, social commentary, and a lot of heart. I love these stories, every single one of them.”

Tayari Jones is the author of Leaving Atlanta, winner of the 2003 Hurston Wright Award. Her new novel, The Untelling will be published in April.

Harold Pinter tells the BBC he’s stopped writing plays for now.

Pinter told Front Row presenter Mark Lawson that his energies were “going in different directions, certainly into poetry”.

“But also, as I think you know, over the last few years I’ve made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies,” he said.

“I’m using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very worrying as things stand.”

In the UK, the Conservative party is proposing a crack down on book deals by convicts, and that gives the Guardian an opportunity to look at a bunch of famous books written while their authors were behind bars.

The finalists in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books are The Plot Against America, and Cloud Atlas. Visit the site if you’d like to see who won.