Short Story Collection Wins Prestigious First Book Award

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT by Margot Singer has won the 2008 Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Final judge Cathy Hankla, who selected the winning title, writes:

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is a stunning collection of interwoven narratives that delves deep into the human need for both belonging and moral integrity. Singer examines origins, cruelties and beliefs in the context of the nefarious nature of memory as a vehicle for obtaining truth. While some of Singer’s characters are literally digging for material shards that might prove ancient texts valid, the ashes of another character are by chance winds. Impermanence and timeless truth struggle in these pages, finding characters, language and form that are at once recognizable and original.

Singer’s short story collection, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, also received an honorable mention for the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a finalist for the 2008 John Gardner Fiction Book Award.

Congratulations as well to David Kirby. The prolific Kirby, who has published two essay collections with the UGA Press, ULTRA-TALK and WHAT IS A BOOK?, has just won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award for his LSU Press poetry collection The House on Boulevard Street. SIBA Book Awards titles are nominated and voted on by hundreds of independent booksellers from across the South. 2008 marks a new chapter in the SIBA Book Awards; from now on the awards ceremony will be held at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.

Images:
Top: Jacket for The Pale of Settlement.
Bottom: Margot Singer by Tim DeGenero.

New Book Recalls the Complicated Past of a George Washington Historic Site

The likely site of George Washington's boyhood home has been unearthed near Fredericksburg, Virginia. It's a great story, and a well deserved plug for the work of archaeologists and historians. Deep in most of the media coverage, past the musings over whether we'll ever find young Washington's hatchet or the stump of the apocryphal cherry tree, is news of a plan to reconstruct the home and its outbuildings as they may have looked in the 1740s, when Washington was living there.

In HERE, GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS BORN, Seth C. Bruggeman tells of a similar project—the reconstruction of the Washington birthplace. He uses the controversial legacy of the birthplace site to raise questions about "memory, ownership of the past, and the wonderfully slippery meaning of authenticity." "All kinds of Americans at all times seek to involve themselves in the past," says Bruggeman. He asks what compels us to make pilgrimages to places like the Washington birthplace, and urges us to think critically about our need to be grounded in history through seeing and touching the "real" thing. HERE, GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS BORN, which will be published in November 2008, has been praised as a "fascinating tale of the elusive quest for authenticity at a modern American tourist site" by David Glassberg, author of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life.

T. H. Breen takes on similar issues in IMAGINING THE PAST, in which he writes that "our dreams of things to come are built upon the interpretation of past experience." IMAGINING THE PAST tells of Breen's historical research in the celebrated Long Island resort town of East Hampton and what happened when some of his discoveries collided with local, dearly held notions about East Hampton's early days. "Through Breen's eloquent writing," said Charles E. Orser, Jr., in the Journal of American History, "the past becomes the present, and readers learn that the stories we tell ourselves about the past are fluid and changeable."

A good deal of excavating—in textual repositories—also went into the making of LIFE OF GENERAL WASHINGTON. Written by David Humphreys, one of Washington's aides, it is the only biography authorized by the general himself. In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, editor Rosemarie Zagarri assembled manuscripts from three separate archives to reconstruct the complete biography. George Athan Billias's review in the Journal of American History says that "it not only contributes to the Washington canon but also helps us to separate more critically the man from the myth."

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Hardscrabble Wins 2008 Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award for Poetry

The Virginia Quarterly Review and the University of Georgia Press are pleased to announce that one of the inaugural selections of the VQR Poetry series, HARDSCRABBLE by Kevin McFadden, has been awarded the 2008 Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award for Poetry.

The award, which recognizes work by emerging poets living in and writing on the South, will be presented April 2-4, 2009 at the Arts & Education Council Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

"I've known the Fellowship through its distinguished roll call of authors," says McFadden, who is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. "Robert Penn Warren was one of my earliest influences in deciding to move to the South."

McFadden received the news from George Garrett, a founding member of the Fellowship, just before the acclaimed Southern novelist, essayist, and poet died in May. "All the reasons to be honored by this award reside in the generosity and warmth of a spirit like George's, a spirit he helped kindle the Fellowship with."

The Fellowship of Southern Writers was created in 1989 to nurture literature in the American South. Among its founding members were Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Ernest Gaines, William Styron, and Elizabeth Spencer. Its archives are housed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where it meets during the Conference on Southern Literature.

Images:
Left: Cover of Hardscrabble
Right: Kevin McFadden by Angie Hogan

Short Takes

Interviews:
Jennifer Chang, author of THE HISTORY OF ANONYMITY, in Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle blog.

In the news:
David Glenn, a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, covers FROM SUPERPOWER TO BESIEGED GLOBAL POWER in a June 13 (subscription-only) piece about new foreign policy books on topics that deserve more serious treatment in the 2008 presidential race. Glenn begins his coverage of the book by noting that "one scholar who sees serious differences within the Democratic Party is [the book's coeditor] Edward A. Kolodziej, a political scientist who directs the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kolodziej argues that both Bush-style neoconservatives and Clintonesque liberal internationalists hold vastly exaggerated senses of America's ability to shape the world. Our overwhelming military dominance, Kolodziej says, does not mean that we can snap our fingers and persuade allies and adversaries to do as we please."

Reviews:
WALKING THE WRACK LINE by NPR's Alan Cheuse, in his roundup of "Summer Books to Feed Your Literary Addiction."

A NATURAL SENSE OF WONDER in the Princeton Packet.

CORNBREAD NATION 4 in the Tampa Tribune.

HARDSCRABBLE in C-Ville: Charlottesville News and Arts.

MOTORING in the Charleston Post and Courier.

MARGARET FULLLER, WANDERING PILGRIM in the Feminist Review.

Awards:
Kyle Dargan's BOUQUET OF HUNGERS is a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry.

A NATURAL SENSE OF WONDER was named one of 10 best books for teachers in Scholastic magazine's summer reading roundup. Scholastic also ran an excerpt of the book in their Parent & Child magazine.

We get blogged:
Mention of WINNERS HAVE YET TO BE ANNOUNCED in Conversational Reading.

Citation of ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER in Doing Ethics.

Mention of the Flannery O'Connor Award short fiction series in Emerging Writers Network.