2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalists

Finalists have been announced for this year's Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The award is given annually to promote the power of literature to promote peace.Winners will be announced November 13th in Dayton, Ohio.

This year's finalists are...

Fiction
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu (Riverhead)
Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste (Norton)
The Gendarme by Mark Mustain (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)
Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (HarperCollins)

Nonfiction
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 by Kai Bird (Scribner)
Little Princes by Conor Grennan (HarperCollins)
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House)
For Us Surrender is Out of the Question by Mac McClelland (Soft Skull Press)
In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance by Wilbert Rideau (Knopf)
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)

Big Nate on a Roll

Click here to read my latest review of Lincoln Peirce's Big Nate on a Roll, the third installment of the fantastic Big Nate series, published in yesterday's Shelf Awareness.

PEN Awards

PEN Award winners were announced today. New to this year's award categories: PEN Emerging Writers Award, the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. Congratulations to all winners.

Ten Things We Did (And Probably Shouldn't Have)

Check out my review of Sarah Mlynowski's Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have) on  Shelf Awareness for Readers.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

Title: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Author: Patrick Suskind

ISBN: 9780375725845

Price: $15.00

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is not like you or I. Three things set him apart. One, he has an extraordinary sense of smell. Grenouille can identify types of trees, can tell you which cow in the field produced the milk served at breakfast, and can use this knowledge to create perfumes more magnificent than you can imagine. Two, Grenouille has no smell himself. No normal human odor is given off by him, nor has he ever produced a smell. And the third thing that sets Grenouille apart from you and I is that Grenouille is a murderer.