Do You Teach English?

Congratulations to Mia Alvar, who has won the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for her short story collection In the Country. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, and now available as a Vintage paperback, In the Country is comprised of nine stories that give voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora and explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined.

Writer Pat Conroy passed away on March 4, 2016, at the age of 70 at his home in Beaufort, South Carolina.

By Sara Nović, author of Girl at War: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, March 2016) Recently my first novel became an audiobook to which I cannot listen. This is not a complaint, exactly; to write a book someone wants to publish in any format is a writer’s dream. But to hold some disc that

Congratulations to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, author of Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, who has been selected as the winner of the 2016 Templeton Prize.

Congratulations to Toni Morrison, who has been selected as the winner of the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which goes to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.

Congratulations to the following Random House authors who have been selected as finalists for the 2016 George Washington Prize: Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost; Flora Fraser, author of The Washingtons; and Robert Middlekauff, author of Washington’s Revolution.

David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) has won the Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize, given by the American Historical Association.

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks across the world, there has been a renewed global conversation about what motivates such criminal behavior, and what can be done to stop it.  As this discussion around violence and other illegal acts develops, Dr. Stanton Samenow’s landmark work Inside the Criminal Mind is more relevant now than ever.

Congratulations to Kevin Barry, whose novel Beatlebone has won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize. Established in 2013, the Goldsmiths Prize honors British and Irish writers for “fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form.”

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off

Cinderland exposes the real danger lay in covering the truth in order to prop up our notions of being a wholesome, safe place to live. The need to be “good” seems especially potent in small communities, likely due to a false nostalgic notion that small towns are quaint, protected, and silent. But silence does not a safe place make. Instead it ripens an environment toward sexual violence, and it also heightens the private aftershocks that are weathered for years to come.

The American Library Association (ALA) has announced the shortlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, which are awarded annually for the previous year’s best books written for adult readers and published in the United States.