What I got at LATFOB*

I don't normally purchase books at a conference or festival unless I'm getting them signed, but many of the bookstores were giving away this fabulous book bag if one purchased three Penguin books:

What did I fill it with?  These:

And, just for fun:

I must admit to being disappointed at the "free prize", which turned out to be a generic temporary tattoo which had nothing to do with Miss Jane.



*LA Times Festival of Books

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists

The finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced this morning:

 Biography

• Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (Doubleday)
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking)
• Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie (Random House)
• Reading My Father: A Memoir by Alexandra Styron (Scribner)
• My Long Trip Home by Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster)

Current Interest

• Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 
• El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo (Bloomsbury Press)  
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 
• The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear by Seth Mnookin (Simon & Schuster)

Fiction

• Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor (Frances Coady Book/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)
• The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (Knopf)
• Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books/University of North Carolina Wilmington)
• Luminarium by Alex Shakar (SoHo Press)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

• The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Little, Brown)
• Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press)
• Shards by Ismet Prcic (Grove Press, Black Cat)
• The Arriviste by James Wallenstein (Milkweed Editions)

Graphic Novel

• I Will Bite You! And Other Stories by Joseph Lambert (Secret Acres)
• Celluloid by Dave McKean (Fantagraphics)
• Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse)
• Congress of the Animals by Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics)
• Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)

History

• The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination by Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury Press)
• 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart (Knopf)
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White (W.W. Norton)

Mystery-Thriller

• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)
• Plugged by Eoin Colfer (Overlook Press)
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner)
• Snowdrops: A Novel by A.D. Miller (Doubleday)
• The End of Wasp Season by Denise Mina (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)

Poetry

• Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press)
• Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat Books)
• The Public Gardens by Linda Norton (Pressed Wafer)
• Double Shadow: Poems by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Devotions by Bruce Smith (University of Chicago Press)
•  

Science & Technology

• A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher by Joel Achenbach (Simon & Schuster)
• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon)
• Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs)
• Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster)
• Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker (W.W. Norton)

Young Adult Literature

• Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (Scholastic Press)
• The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman (Scholastic Press)  
• A Monster Calls: Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd by Patrick Ness (Candlewick Press)
• Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet (Candlewick Press)
• The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press)

The Robert Kirsch Award for significant contribution to American letters

• Rudolfo Anaya  

The Innovator's Award

• Figment (a collaborative digital writing community for teens)

The awards will be presented on the evening of Friday, April 20th, 2012.