Our esteemed editor Steven Church's essay "I'm Just Getting to the Disturbing Part", from the Fall 2007 issue of Fourth Genre, has been been selected as a Notable Essay by Robert Atwan for Houghton Mifflin's Best American Essays 2008.
Fourth Genre
Friday, October 17, 2008
Dinty Moore is the Grubbiest!
TNS #1 Contributor Dinty Moore wins the 2008 Grub Street National Book Award in Nonfiction. You can read Dinty's "44 Reasons Why You Should Absolutely, Positively Never Write That Book" in our newly minted inaugural issue. Congratulations, Dinty!
www.grubstreet.org
www.grubstreet.org
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
National Book Award Finalists
From Publisher's Lunch:
National Book Award Finalists
Fiction nominees range from the 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for a book the AP calls "an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s" to debut novels from Rachel Kushner and Salvatore Scibona. The winners will be named November 19:
Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
Young People's Literature
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)
National Book Award Finalists
Fiction nominees range from the 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for a book the AP calls "an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s" to debut novels from Rachel Kushner and Salvatore Scibona. The winners will be named November 19:
Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
Young People's Literature
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Normal is Now!!
Hey Normal People,
TNS#1 has hit the pavement or the newstands or the hands, backpacks, pockets (really big ones), bathrooms and briefcases of America. Yes, America. We're an American magazine. Or something. But I'm telling you, this thing is so beautiful. When I opened my office door to find 31 boxes piled up against the back wall, the whole room smelled like magazine--that kind of wet, inky smell that sometimes, if you bury your nose in the binding, can remind you of the ditto machine in Mr. Dillehay's 4th grade class, his toupee, and the way he flapped his arms in a yellow shirt to the "Chicken Dance" song on LP . . . Or something like that. If you can't get your hands on one (and we're working hard to make that happen), go to the website www.thenormalschool.com and subscribe. We'll send you a copy. You'll love it. You're children will love the art. Tell them there's a 3-headed chicken fighting a grasshopper somewhere in the magazine and they'll dive right in . . . tell them to "find everything abnormal" in the picture of idyllic farm life and it will entertain them for hourse on airplanes . . . Or not. But you will love what you read in these pages. I promise. You will laugh. I can almost guarantee that . . . Just trust me. Subscribe. Read. Pumas.
SWC
TNS#1 has hit the pavement or the newstands or the hands, backpacks, pockets (really big ones), bathrooms and briefcases of America. Yes, America. We're an American magazine. Or something. But I'm telling you, this thing is so beautiful. When I opened my office door to find 31 boxes piled up against the back wall, the whole room smelled like magazine--that kind of wet, inky smell that sometimes, if you bury your nose in the binding, can remind you of the ditto machine in Mr. Dillehay's 4th grade class, his toupee, and the way he flapped his arms in a yellow shirt to the "Chicken Dance" song on LP . . . Or something like that. If you can't get your hands on one (and we're working hard to make that happen), go to the website www.thenormalschool.com and subscribe. We'll send you a copy. You'll love it. You're children will love the art. Tell them there's a 3-headed chicken fighting a grasshopper somewhere in the magazine and they'll dive right in . . . tell them to "find everything abnormal" in the picture of idyllic farm life and it will entertain them for hourse on airplanes . . . Or not. But you will love what you read in these pages. I promise. You will laugh. I can almost guarantee that . . . Just trust me. Subscribe. Read. Pumas.
SWC
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Le Clezio of France
While The Normal School congratulates M. Le Clezio, it is interesting to note that much of the discussion this week about why NOT an American hinged on the fact that only a relatively small amount of American writers' work finds its way into translation.
Yet, Publisher's Lunch reports that "Very few of [Le Clezio's] works are currently available in US editions, though the NYT says that 12 of his 40 works have been translated at some point. Among them, the University of Nebraska Press published The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts in 2003, and Onitsha in 1997; Curbstone Press published Wandering Star in 2004. But Agence France Presse assures that he 'is one of the French writers best known outside his country and one of the most wide-ranging in his choice of subject matter. He is an avid traveller, and his fictions are as likely to be set in Mexico or the Sahara as in Paris or London.' He lives part of the year in New Mexico and is reported to have taught at the University of New Mexico."
www.nytimes.com
Yet, Publisher's Lunch reports that "Very few of [Le Clezio's] works are currently available in US editions, though the NYT says that 12 of his 40 works have been translated at some point. Among them, the University of Nebraska Press published The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts in 2003, and Onitsha in 1997; Curbstone Press published Wandering Star in 2004. But Agence France Presse assures that he 'is one of the French writers best known outside his country and one of the most wide-ranging in his choice of subject matter. He is an avid traveller, and his fictions are as likely to be set in Mexico or the Sahara as in Paris or London.' He lives part of the year in New Mexico and is reported to have taught at the University of New Mexico."
www.nytimes.com
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Good News about our Normal Friends
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