In the News: Authors

Book awards: Troy Jollimore *99 and Daniel Mendelsohn *94 won 2006 National Book Critics Circle awards on March 8 in New York City. Jollimore, who teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico, won in poetry for Tom Thomson in Purgatory, whose title poem is a sequence of 42 sonnets that explore love, work, time, pain, and sorrow, as experienced by the everyman Tom Thomson. Mendelsohn, a humanities professor at Bard College, won in autobiography for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a memoir about his great-uncle and aunt, Shmiel and Ester Jäger, and their four daughters, who perished in the Holocaust.

Best young novelists: Gabe Hudson, a Hodder Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and lecturer in the creative writing program, and Jonathan Safran Foer ’99 were named to the literary magazine Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists” list March 1 in New York. A former rifleman in the Marine reserves, Hudson is the author of Dear Mr. President, a collection of short stories about the Gulf War. His upcoming novel, American Buddha, about a Vietnamese-American Marine Corps rifleman who fights in the Gulf War, will be published in 2008. Foer is the author of the novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Promising photographers: Works by Eleanor Oakes ’07 and Elizabeth Looke-Stewart ’06 were selected for inclusion in the publication 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, to be published by powerHouse Books and CDS Books in 2008. The book will feature images that explore the theme “transitions.” Oakes’ photographs are interiors of an abandoned psychiatric hospital that, she says, “convey a sense of human presence that still remains within the vacant walls of the institution.” The photographs by Looke-Stewart are of her four younger sisters, and explore their relationships and changes from “girlhood to adolescence,” she says.