2014 Literary Awards

The year’s book award winners are a great place to find books to read and discover new authors. Check out the links and try some samples on your Kindle.  

Nobel Prize in Literature

The highest recognition an author can receive is the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award is given to writers for their body of work. Some notable past winners are: Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".

Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Dora Bruder

The award is open to writers from around the world. This year, Patrick Modiano, a French novelist was awarded the prize.

The Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction  is “awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” There are also many other awards ranging from journalist to nonfiction. The Award was founded in 1918. Some previous winners are Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction goes to Donna Tartt for The Goldfinch.

The National Book Award

The National Book Award’s mission is to “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” This book has a long and varied past and is one of the major awards given to American writers. This is another great place to find books to read and they do a lot of outreach to communities and in supporting public appearances by writers. Faulkner, Pynchon, Updike, McCarthy, and Franzen are some of the past nominees and winners.

The 2014 National Book Award for Fiction goes to Phil Klay for Redeployment.

The Man-Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe, according to Wikipedia. This is a very big deal. This is the biggest of the English Language awards given. They have a long list which they announce very early on and then a short list is selected out of that.

This is a major award to follow because it includes many countries that speak English and covers a diverse range of topics. I discovered a couple of my favorite writers while reading these novels, Julian Barnes and J.M. Coetzee.

The 2014 Man-Booker Prize winner is Richard Flanagan with The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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2013 Literary Awards

English: Image of American Writer Adam Johnson. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The year’s book award winners are a great place to find books to read and discover new authors. Check out the links and try some samples on your ereader.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The highest recognition an author can receive is the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award is given to writers for their body of work. Some notable past winners are: Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story”.

The award is open to writers from around the world. This year, Alice Munro, a Canadian prose writer was awarded the prize.

Dear Life: Stories (Vintage International)

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Vintage International)

The Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction  is “awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” There are also many other awards ranging from journalist to nonfiction. The Award was founded in 1918. Some previous winners are Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction goes to Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master's Son

The National Book Award

The National Book Award’s mission is to “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” This book has a long and varied past and is one of the major awards given to American writers. This is another great place to find books to read and they do a lot of outreach to communities and in supporting public appearances by writers. Faulkner, Pynchon, Updike, McCarthy, and Franzen are some of the past nominees and winners.

The 2013 National Book Award for Fiction goes to James McBride for The Good Lord Bird.

The Man-Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe, according to Wikipedia. This is a very big deal. This is the biggest of the English Language awards given. They have a long list which they announce very early on and then a short list is selected out of that.

This is a major award to follow because it includes many countries that speak English and covers a diverse range of topics. I discovered a couple of my favorite writers while reading these novels, Julian Barnes and J.M. Coetzee.

The 2013 Man-Booker Prize for fiction winner is Eleanor Catton with The Luminaries. She is the youngest winner in the prize’s history at 27.

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature posts. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice. Bookmark the site for future posts, free Kindle books, and the best Kindle novels. Make sure you subscribe and check back for more. Happy Reading.

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• Alice Munro Collection of Short Stories 'Family Furnishings'
• The 2014 Nobel Prizes at a glance

Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain

Mark Twain is one of my favorite American authors and I was surprised upon reading this book that I had not heard of it before, even though I had read the classics by him, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and I loved those. Letters from the Earth is a short work, that basically takes religion and the hypocrisy of society to task.

Anti-Stratfordian Mark Twain, wrote "Is Shakespeare Dead?" shortly before his death in 1910. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The story is told from Satan’s point of view upon visiting earth. He is writing back to the other angels in heaven and reporting on what he sees on earth, how the humans behave and their beliefs. He does not hold any punches and still manages to be funny. It has many memorable lines and insights.

Letters From The Earth - Complete Edition

The commentary by Satan is very harsh and seems contrary to Twains, more humorous writings, but according to Wikipedia:

Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters.

If you don’t have a Kindle or eReader click to check them out: Kindle

One of the many quotes that I marked was:

“Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded; and no descendant of theirs has ever entered otherwise, All have entered naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. The have entered it modet. They had to acquire immodesty and the soiled mind; there was no other way to get it. A Christian mother’s first duty is to soil her child’s mind, and she does not neglect it. her lad grows up to be a missionary, and goes to the innocent savage and to the civilized Japanese, and soils their minds. Whereupon they adopt immodesty, they conceal their bodies, they stop bathing naked together.”

Download a sample and read some of Mark Twain’s most honest writings from a time when even America’s leading humorist could not publish such biting criticism.

See my other posts by Twain:
Tom Sawyer
Autobiography
Biography

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature posts. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future posts, free Kindle books, and the best Kindle novels. Make sure you subscribe and check back for more. Happy Reading.

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street

Published 1984

The House on Mango Street is a coming of age story by Sandra Cisneros first published in 1984. I remember reading this story in Middle School and thinking that this was the first time I was able to really relate to a character. The short novel is written in a series of vignettes dealing with memorable experiences growing up in a poor Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. The stories deal with issues of identity and growing up to relationships and sex. The main character describes her experiences and her friends who are discovering many things about relationships and what it means to become a woman.

We are currently planning an introduction to literature course and this is one of the books that keeps coming up because we are looking at different recurring themes in literature including banned books and why people protest literature. This and the rest of Sandra Cisneros works were banned in Arizona in 2012 following a law banning works that “gave students a one-sided approach to history promoting Latino Activism.” Cisneros gave a reading at my University in 2012 promoting her new book and in the Q and A was asked what she thought about Arizona banning her books. She said it was great, that she was having one of her best years in book sales. The unintended publicity found a new generation of readers for her and she was grateful.

The House on Mango Street is available on the Kindle for $5.99. Pick up your copy of the latest banned “anti-American” book and see what all the fuss is about.

For more on the Arizona debacle follow this link.

http://www.votolatino.org/blogs/sandra-cisneros-among-authors-banned-tucson-arizona

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature news. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future posts, free Kindle books, and the best Kindle novels. Make sure you subscribe and check back for more. You can follow me on twitter @seframos. Happy Reading.

The Professor's House

Willa Cather
The Professor's House - $4.65
Published in 1925

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer Prize winning American writer. She was a very confident writer, working for years on novels to produce a very specific voice. She did not fit in with other women writers of her time and is said to have “regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish.” She is now recognized as a major American writer and the foremost woman writer.

In undergrad, I had the pleasure of taking a Willa Cather course with a renowned Cather Scholar Dr. Margaret Doane. Dr. Doane has published over 60 articles and papers dealing with many themes in various Cather novels. We read several novels by Willa Cather and The Professor’s House was the one that made the most impact on me.

The novel is split into three parts. The first concerns the family of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and the midlife crisis he is experiencing after winning an award for his life’s work. He has lost his lust for life after publishing his life’s work and still having a life to live after. He has become estranged with his family and is mourning the death of a brilliant pupil, Tom Outland. The second part is the story of Tom Outland that the Professor is editing from Tom’s journals. The last part concerns the Professor trying to hang on to his old life while his family is away on a trip in Europe.

The novel, like most great novels, has inspired a wide array of readings. A common reading of the novel is that it’s a “story about the moral decline of a money driven society.” This was a popular reading of the novel for many years until the novel and Willa Cather began to be studied more widely. Dr. Doane was the first to do a feminist reading of The Professor’s House. Willa Cather was a woman writing a man’s view of women. Generally, the views of the male characters were viewed as her views. It wasn't until doing a feminist reading of the novel that you can see that “the Professor strongly feels women, particularly those in his family, are destructive and petty.” The Professor is always amazed with women even though he finds fault with them. Professor “St. Peter and other males’ --thoughts about women shows a perspective which is both prejudiced and insensitive.”

The readings of the novel range from societal critique to feminist readings and more recently homosexual readings. Whichever reading you choose to use, The Professor’s House is a novel worth reading. This is not her most famous novel or the one she won awards for, but it is the one that defines Willa Cather for me. Download a sample and check out the foremost American woman writer.

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Emily Dickinson Poems

Emily Dickinson on the Left 

Poems by Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
1886

Emily Dickinson has been in the news lately because a new picture has been discovered. She is a major American poet and an infamous recluse. Prior to this picture being discovered there was only one other picture of her at sixteen years of age. She only published a handful of poems in her life out of the nearly eighteen hundred she wrote.

Emily Dickinson at 16

Poetry is very intimidating to people including myself. I have been thinking about how to structure this post for days now and I think the best thing to do is present the books to you and leave the research to those that want to learn more. She has a way with words and I will let her work speak for itself.

6

IF I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

The convention of the time was not to name the poems so most of hers have been numbered in subsequent publications. Here are the three volumes available in the Kindle Store.

Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One

Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Two

Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete

Check out our Facebook Page and Like us to keep up to date on the latest Kindle Literature news. You can share this post or any others on your social media of choice and bookmark the site for future post. You can also grab the RSS feed or try a   free 2 week trial*  on your Kindle to have the posts delivered directly to your Kindle. Follow me on twitter @seframos. Happy Reading.