We were pleased to host Pauline Chen, one of our favorite VQR contributors, yesterday for her reading as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Pauline read to a packed audience at the UVA Bookstore and we hope to have a podcast of her reading up within the next week. (To the right, Pauline poses with VQR editor Ted Genoways.) Later in the day, Pauline taped an interview with C-SPAN’s Booknotes BookTV and we’re told the interview should be broadcast in the coming weeks. Check their website for more info.

Pauline’s book Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality is doing extraordinarly well for a first book. It’s already made an appearance on the NYT Bestseller list and we hear it’s gone into its fifth printing. We love it when a talented and genuinely nice person gets the success they deserve!

The big annual literary shindig here in C’ville, the Virginia Festival of the Book, starts today. Here’s a rundown of selected events featuring VQR contrbutors: (more…)

We just heard that we’ve been named a finalist for two National Magazine Awards: for General Excellence (for circulation less than 100,000) and for Fiction. We were one of 27 magazines that received multiple nominations and we were nominated in the two categories we won last year. This makes three consecutive years that we’ve received nominations for General Excellence and Fiction, and a total of ten nominations in the last three years!

Here’s the complete list.

The National Book Critics Circle announced their 2006 awards last night in NYC. Among the winners was VQR contributor and art consultant (he prefers “art wrangler”) Lawrence Weschler for his book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney’s). Weschler’s essay “The Graphics of Solidarity” from the Winter 2006 issue of VQR appears in Everything That Rises.

Congratulations to Ren and all of the other winners:

• Kiran Desai for fiction for The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Troy Jollimore for poetry for Tom Thompson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House)
• Daniel Mendelsohn for autobiography for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Julie Phillips in biography for James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin’s)
• Simon Schama for nonfiction for Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)