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Ploughshares is pleased to present Andre Dubus III with the sixth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for his short story 'Garys Way,' which appeared in the Summer 2023 [...]

The Caldecott Medal, named in honor of the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, is an annual award given by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the [...]

In the midst of the pandemic, the American Library Association (ALA) Rainbow Round Table (RRT) celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Book Awards, which recognize books of exceptional merit relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and plus (LGBTQIA+) community experience. In tandem, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) reported record numbers of book challenges, mostly based on texts written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community. This chapter considers these seemingly divergent issues within a broader social and historical context – and serves as a testament to the steadfast resolve of librarians to resist censorship and promote the freedom to read during turbulent times. The first section provides an overview of pandemic complexities. The second part of the chapter centers around professional milestones and some recent award-winning literary works. The middle section briefly reviews issues related to challenges over time. This is followed by an exploration of the recent surge in censorship with emphasis on LGBTQIA+ content in public libraries as well as aspects of resistance. The final section offers some ideas for moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Dutch Linguistics & Literature / Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal & Letterkunde is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this interview, Colombian author Daniel Ferreira talks about his process of finding an aesthetic expression of the popular and constructing complex characters in his novels. Ferreira has won several literary awards and has been internationally recognized. During the interview, Ferreira mentions how he has turned to religious, cultural, and forbidden corridos traditions to enrich his narratives. He also talks about the presence of the father in his novels, the construction of strong female characters, and the importance of confession, love, and memory in his work. Additionally, he highlights his interest in exploring the cracks and silences of Colombian history. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of the study was to examine two types of texts for beginning readers. While leveled readers tend to be widely used by teachers, less well known are Geisel Award books. The Geisel Award is given annually to a high-quality trade book appropriate for beginning readers. This content analysis examined one set of first grade leveled readers and Geisel books to determine what each offers in terms of support for beginning readers beyond word and sentence level features. We present findings related to the genre, plot, characters, literary language, and the distinctive features of the visual texts to highlight the differences between the two collections. Of particular importance are findings related to the differences in what the texts offer beginning readers in terms of features of engagement, the diversity of characters, and the inclusion of systems for conveying meaning beyond verbal text. The article concludes with recommendations for teachers and teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, Behrouz Boochani's testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation's carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longer novels on shortlists are significantly more likely to win literary awards. This relationship is shown using all shortlisted novels for three prestigious prizes—the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award for Fiction, over the time period 1963–2021. The result is robust to controlling for author gender and Goodreads rating, and to whether one uses absolute length (in pages) or relative length on the shortlist. The size of the effect suggests other valid cues are underweighted in the process of selecting a winner. Judgment and decision-making research suggests several causes of the apparent bias. One is the representativeness heuristic: longer novels resemble the tomes that constitute the foundations of the Western canon, and this similarity may subconsciously sway judges. Other explanations include an effort heuristic and the effects of accountability on decisions. These results may explain previous findings that Booker Prize winners are not higher quality than shortlisted novels. The findings cast doubt on the validity of awards as signals of literary merit and have broader implications for the inferred quality of expert judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Law / Revista de Llengua i Dret is the property of Revista de Llengua i Dret and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is a review of Federica Liveriero's book, "Relational Liberalism: Democratic Co-Authorship in a Pluralistic World." The review discusses Liveriero's analysis of the justificatory dilemma faced by liberal theories, which involves providing normative arguments while also guaranteeing the endorsement of political principles by real-world individuals. Liveriero proposes a framework that combines a loose normative framework of liberal ideals with procedures and concrete proposals that take into account the perspectives of reasonable citizens. The review acknowledges the merits of Liveriero's approach but also highlights some uncertainties and compromises within her framework. [Extracted from the article]

Editors' Note: The following essay is drawn from the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, conferred on the best book published on the Civil War era in 2022. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to author and public historian R. Isabela Morales for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, published by Oxford University Press. Morales delivered her speech during the Southern Historical Association's annual meeting on November 10, 2023, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. In the essay, Morales discusses the subtle ways the Civil War shaped the lives of one African American family, the importance of family history to the larger field, and her challenges writing the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual and other simulations of your future which has recently been released in the UK and the USA as The Ten Percent Thief as part of a three-book deal. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the 'Times of India AutHer' Award and the 'Valley of Words Award', both prestigious literary awards in India. Her work has also been longlisted for a BSFA Award. Lavanya has been published in several magazines and anthologies, and her short fiction is forthcoming in the anthologies, The Best of World Science Fiction: Volume 2 and Someone in Time, among other publications. Lavanya's occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.'s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives between the cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad in India and is currently working on her next novel. Lavanya is in conversation with E. Dawson Varughese is a Snr Fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities, (MAHE), Manipal, India whose research on post-millennial fiction in English currently focusses on speculative and dystopian fiction. She has recently completed a manuscript for Bloomsbury on Indian speculative fiction in English and ideas of desi dystopias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relatively new bundle of scholarship gathered under the notion of a 'global 1989' has produced an innovative field of research that highlights the necessity of a global approach towards the implosion of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet this literature has neglected the broad range of international and transnational organizations which had an indispensable role during, but also after, the Cold War. Therefore this article attempts to approach the 'global 1989' from the vantage point of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The analysis of this large trade union confederation sheds new light on post-Cold War labour internationalism, which has often been overshadowed by the developments leading up to the establishment of the ITUC in 2006. Furthermore, the article uncovers how the end of state socialism and its global reverberations engendered new fissures, debates, and tensions within the organization. While there might have been a 'rush to the East' during the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, globalization – which within the trade union landscape was accelerated by the global 1989 – became a far more pressing challenge during the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bavarian glassblower Herman Oscar Mueller (fl. 1900s–1960s) was employed for over forty years at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in his role as a glassblower making intricate glass models of biological subjects. From 1903 to 1945 he produced over one thousand models of invertebrate organisms that combined beauty, morphological accuracy and exceptional glassblowing skill. His talent often surpassed that of the famous Blaschkas of Dresden. Mueller enjoyed worldwide fame in his lifetime, yet his life and models have since fallen into relative obscurity, and few publications record his achievements. In contrast, the Blaschkas are the subject of extensive documentation. To correct this imbalance, Mueller's life and work are here analyzed, drawing on the large collection of primary sources in the Research Library of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington DC, and the Rakow Research Library of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, amongst others. Mueller's life provides important insights into his highly-specialized role as a museum glassblower, the changing role of natural history collections in the early twentieth century, and the ways in which the lives of important figures can be obscured by a focus on other, better documented individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An array of low-yield weapons will play a vital role in integrated deterrence. *The following essay, submitted in June 2022, earned the Junior Division USSTRATCOM General Larry D. Welch Deterrence Writing Award. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary prizes, while providing legitimacy of artistic excellence to authors, are delicately poised in modern prize culture. They must maintain a balance between the artistic merit of literature and the health of the economic capital of the publishing industry and sponsors. This paper meticulously examines the myriad proliferation of literary prizes and the convergence of its intricacies--the process of nomination and selection, sponsorships, promotion, media coverage of the award ceremony, celebratory nature of the occasion, the climactic drama of acceptance speech, and controversy--to characterize the centrality of economic force at play. It reflects the dependency of art form's flourishing and sustenance on the logic of the economic marketplace. Through a close analysis of the controversial selection of certain authors and particular books, the paper looks at the epiphenomena of prestigious literary prizes to demonstrate a classic working of the neoliberal market outcome of controversy as publicity/currency, which not only brings about manufacturing of aura for controversial writers as celebrities but simultaneously radiates its effect on the demand value of their literary products and investing participants. It concludes that centrifugal dissemination and consumption of mediatised controversy events across national and international borders generates a centripetal concentration of socio-economic capital for writers, publishers and sponsors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Iberoamericana (Liverpool University Press) is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This document is a poem titled "I sing the body ethnographic" by Khando Langri, which won first prize in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2022 Writing Awards. The poem explores the author's experiences as a Tibetan student at the University of Oxford and their connection to Tibetan objects in British museums. Langri expresses frustration with ethnographic practices and the consumption of objects and bodies of dispossessed peoples. The poem blends the diasporic body with objects in exile and calls for a reevaluation of the gaze in museum contexts. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the role of the Multispecialty Recruitment Assessment (MSRA) in selecting future surgeons for training. It explores the effectiveness of the MSRA in assessing surgical suitability and considers alternative methods. The article raises concerns about the MSRA's ability to identify well-rounded surgeons without discrimination and suggests combining elements of the portfolio with the MSRA or the MRCS Part A exam as a better approach. It also discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of the MSRA and the controversy surrounding situational judgement tests. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for a robust selection process for future surgeons in the face of an oversaturated system. [Extracted from the article]