Wow. August blew by like a gorgeous tornado. There was Bread Loaf, which was amazing as always, and then preparations to begin my tenure at the Gilman School, as the 2010-2011 Tickner Fellow in Creative Writing. Novel revisions are progressing. The Frank O’Connor Festival is right around the corner. And people I know are doing all kinds of awesome stuff. A few highlights:

You will want to get Matthew Salesses’ Our Island of Epidemics, due out in October from PANK. It’s singular and wonderful and filled with really cool artwork.

Dzanc Books is hosting their annual Write-A-Thon this week. And they’ve also announced DISQUIET: International Literary Program, to be held in Lisbon(!), from June 19 - July 1, 2011.

Tiphanie Yanique, author of the amazing “How to Escape from a Leper Colony,” has won a Rona Jaffe Award.

Michelle Hoover’s debut novel, The Quickening, has recently been written up in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. In other words: Michelle is a rock star. 

Former Bread Loaf waiter love! Justin Torres has sold his debut novel, Breeding, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Michael Lukas will see his first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, published by Harper Collins in February.

Eugene Cross has won the 2009 Dzanc Prize, and Dzanc Books has signed his collection of stories.

Inevitably I’ve left out friends who have recently done something awesome, and I’ll have to do a part 2, but that’s a good kind of problem to have. Writing is a tough racket, as my Uncle Joe has said, and it’s deeply heartening to see good things happening to people in your community. I hope you’ll check out one or two (or, um, all) of the books/authors/projects mentioned here. They’re worth your time and then some. 

It’s setting in that summer is entering its final days, but oh what a summer it’s been. I’m just back from a 2 week stint on an island, where I got as tan as this pale chick can get (see below), and now I’m gathering steam for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference—aka one of the best places on earth. I’m in workshop with a writer I hugely admire, Jim Shepard, and I’ve heard wonderful things about Miles From Nowhere, the debut novel authored by Nami Mun, the workshop fellow. I’ll be trotting down to my neighborhood bookstore to pick up a copy soon.

While we’re on the subject of books, good lord, it’s been a stellar summer for reading—Big Machine, A Visit From the Goon Squad, exciting manuscripts-in-progress from friends. Amazing work, all. And there are so many terrific looking books coming out in the fall—Danielle Evans! Tom McCarthy! Amelia Gray! Brock Clarke! Patricia Engel! Terese Svoboda!—I can’t be too sad about September’s gradual approach. And another fall-time thing I'm looking forward to: in September, I’ll be starting my tenure as the Tickner Fellow in creative writing at the Gilman School. 

In the meantime, I recently did a “Backstory” post for Open Letters Monthly and Jan Gardner was kind enough to do a short profile on moi for Boston Globe’s “Shelf Life” section. Novel work continues. As does my compulsive watching of Bruce Willis movies. Happy trails, Hans!

I’m in a hotel room in LA and the weather outside is a little cloudy, but some amazing news has brightened the proverbial skies: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us has made the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor Award, the largest monetary prize for a story collection (yes, I am pinching myself) in the world. The company is pretty great too: Robin Elizabeth Black, TC Boyle, Belle Boggs, David Constantine, and Ron Rash. And in September, I will be Ireland-bound for the awards ceremony. Could it get much better? I think not. I'm really honored and excited about the selection, and thrilled to be in such wonderful company. 

I’m a bit late in reporting this news, but after the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list—which, in my estimation, included some great people, like Chris Adrian, one of my favorite writers, and Salvatore Scibona—Dzanc Books led the way in coming up with an “alterative list.” Here’s how: “we invited our voters to name four authors for consideration, splitting their votes between two that are associated with their publishing interests and two they favor independently.  The only other parameters given to the voters were that these writers needed to be North American, and had to have published at least one book with an independent publishing house…We then compiled the votes, tallied the score, and had a second round of votes for those authors who made the first cut.  Through this purely democratic process, we have compiled a list of twenty authors we find representative of the best talents at work in literary fiction today…” Needless to say, I was hugely honored and surprised and thrilled to be included on this list—thank you, dear voters!

Lists are always kind of impossible, each with their own virtues and flaws. They’re an easy thing to knock, but then again they get us all talking and making alternate lists and then alternate lists for the alternate lists—and, in the end, that seems like a good thing.

Hate lists? Love lists? Who do you think is a “Writer to Watch?” 

I’m just back from the Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop at Hollins College, my first time on the faculty side of a conference, and it was fab. I adored my workshop group, my fellow faculty, and the Hollins campus. I love that feeling of immersion, that world of nothing but words and talking about words, that a conference can bring. And, on our last night, the faculty went out to a wonderful restaurant in downtown Roanoke and I had the best sushi I’ve had in ages. Who would have thought?

In other news, I just did an interview with Shane Jones for Interview Magazine online. The occasion for this interview? Penguin re-released Light Boxes, originally published by Publishing Genius, this month. It’s a terrific book, and what could be a better relief from the summer heat than an epic tale of February? 

This weekend will be filled with packing suitcases and boxes and all manner of things in preparation for a move from Gettysburg, PA to Baltimore. Though I’m excited for the change in scenery, the moving part is never that much fun. Fortunately the web has provided some recent perks:

I’m part of a first book roundtable over at Hobart, with Jedediah Berry, Andrew Ervin, Roxane Gay, Rachel B. Glaser, Julia Holmes, Caitlin Horrocks, Holly Goddard Jones, Tom McAllister, Kevin Wilson, Kyle Beachy, and Mike Young.

Fiction Writers Review ran a lovely review of WtWWLLWAtWLU, courtesy of Liana Imam.

More photos of the One Story ball!

My former teacher and current friend, Connie May Fowler, has a gorgeous essay in the Modern Love section of the NYT. 

I turned 27 last week and now have an abundance of Amazon gift cards and some really awesome perfume. 

Dan Wickett is doing a novella month at the Emerging Writers Network. 

I’m just back from the One Story Dubutante Ball, i.e. one of the best parties I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending. Elliott Holt and I (along with Meghan Kenny, who is responsible for the fab pictures) did a write-up on the event for The Rumpus, who has dubbed us the Glimmer Twins. I could live with that.  

[Star photographer Meghan Kenny, author Josh Weil, and Moi.]

2 pics from the super awesome Gist Street Reading Series in Pittsburgh. This is my last event for a while and the last one that would fall under the umbrella of “book tour,” so it was a great note to end on—terrific crowd, hosts, food, and co-reader, poet and photographer extraordinaire Nick Lantz. 

I was thrilled to see "What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us" on the longlist for the Frank O'Connor Award, the richest prize offered for a story collection, and to be in such amazing company: Pinckney Benedict, Justin Taylor, Dawn Raffel, David Means, Lori Ostlund, Anis Shivani, Richard Bausch, T.C. Boyle, Helen Simpson, Tiphanie Yanique, to name a few. Extra big congrats to Dawn and Anis, two fellow Dzanc-ers, for making the list! 

A handful of nice posts on What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves have been popping up on the web. The collection was featured on Flatmancrooked's list “The Big Secret: 10 Indie-Publishers and 10 books You Might Not Have Heard of For All The Wrong Reasons,” was written about alongside Lydia Peelle’s collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing in Reese Okyong Kwon's essay for The Rumpus, “The Monster Impulse,” and received a lovely review in Is Greater Than. Also, a new story, “Acrobat,” just saw publication in American Short Fiction, which includes great work by Jeff Parker, Jamey Hecht, Susan Steinberg, Matt Bell, Mike Young, and Marie-Helene Bertino.

What else? AWP came and went. I adored seeing all the beautiful people, but am still recovering. I just got back from a lovely event for the Julia Peterkin Award at Converse College. I got to stay in a B & B with a huge claw footed tub, one of the very best things. The spring semester is coming to a close (if you’re reading this and you live near Gettysburg, I’ll be reading this Tuesday, at 8:00 pm, in the Junction at Gettysburg College) and plans for the coming months are taking shape. Speaking of: if you’re in NYC, consider springing for the $50 ticket to attend this One Story fundraiser. These ladies know how to throw a party.