The winners of this year’s PEN America awards were announced earlier this week. Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End won the Jean Stein Book Award, Mimi Lok won the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall was awarded the Open Book Award.
The PEN/Faulkner award finalists were announced yesterday. The nominees are Chloe Aridjis’s Sea Monsters, Yiyun Li’s Where Reason Ends, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The winner will be announced in May.
The New York Times lists all the upcoming book festivals this year, from Brooklyn Book Festival to the weeklong Literature Festival at Sea.
At Literary Hub, Deb Olin Unferth reflects on her new novel Barn 8 and explains how she ended up writing a book that included an anthropomorphized chicken character. “The more we learn about nonhuman animals the more we realize how much we have in common with them, the vast biology and psychology we share, the wide experience and history that unite us,” she writes. “We refuse to believe, to the point of absurdity that we and they are first animals, that there is no us and them in this regard, only us, all of us.”
Marc Benioff is no longer making political donations or fundraising for candidates since he bought Time magazine two years ago, Recode reports. At the New York Times Reader Center, the paper’s politics reporters discuss how they remain impartial. “As reporters, our job is to observe, not participate, and so to that end, I don’t belong to any political party, I don’t belong to any non-journalism organization, I don’t support any candidate, I don’t give money to interest groups and I don’t vote,” White House correspondent Peter Baker explains. “For me, it’s easier to stay out of the fray if I never make up my mind, even in the privacy of the kitchen or the voting booth, that one candidate is better than another, that one side is right and the other wrong.”