Do You Teach Geography?

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.

First presented in 1950, the National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards presented by the National Book Foundation, whose mission is “to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” Congratulations to the Random House authors who have been selected as winners in the following categories: poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

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.

The literary journal Kirkus Reviews has announced the winners for its 2015 book prizes.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara won the fiction category and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates won the prize in nonfiction.

Congratulations to Joan Breton Connelly, whose book, The Parthenon Enigma, has won The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.

The literary journal Kirkus Reviews has announced the finalists for its 2015 book prizes. Congratulations to Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron, and Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, who are finalists in the fiction category, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, and Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature, who are finalists in the nonfiction category.

Congratulations to Julie Schumacher, who has won the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her epistolary campus novel Dear Committee Members.