Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Our Daily Comic: The Wavy Rule
Archive: Ask the Librarians

Send us a question!

Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into

The Squib Report
X-Rea: Irvin Type Watch
Letters & Challenges
On the Spot
Eds. | Personal

National Book Critics Circle: Winners, Honors, New Yorker-ers

Filed under: On the Spot Tagged: awards, biography, books, fiction, Honor Moore, James Wood, John Ashbery, memoir, NBCC, Richard Brody, Roberto Bolaño, Steve Coll, V. S. Naipaul

Emily Gordon writes:

I'm SXSW-bound in a few hours, but I wanted to send a brief report from a stirring and satisfying National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony and reception. The 2008 finalists for NBCC awards included a good group of New Yorker-related people: the late Roberto Bolaño for 2666, Pierre Martory for The Landscapist, which was translated by John Ashbery; Richard Brody for Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard; Steve Coll for The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century; and Honor Moore for The Bishop's Daughter (an excerpt of which ran in the magazine)--and it's true, there are other people in the list you can certainly call New Yorker-related as well. After the ceremony, I spoke with Richard Brody, whose blog and Twitter presence we've noted recently with pleasure; he's a lovely fellow, and I'm glad to have met him.

Bolaño's book got the fiction prize, and after seeing the multiple-cover design, I want to own it. The rest of the prizes came home with Ron Charles, who won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; my former employer the PEN American Center, which got the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; August Kleinzahler and Juan Felipe Herrera in a surprise poetry tie that had the brainy audience whispering in delight; Seth Lerer for criticism; Patrick French for biography (James Wood reviewed the book, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, in December) Ariel Sabar for autobiography; and Dexter Filkins for nonfiction. I'm sure the NBCC website will be full of details tomorrow, so look there then!

0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

Your name

Your email address

Your website address

Remember personal info?

Your comments

See me speak at SXSW 2010 (http://sxsw.com)

Who we?

Emdashes, founded in 2004 by Emily Gordon, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

Affinities | Blurbs

We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.

No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.

This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.

Some writing by Emily Gordon

Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)

More clips.

Tell me more

They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

Primary sources

The New Yorker
Events listed by the magazine
Web resources: New Yorker writers and artists
Books, Organizations, &c.

Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by House of Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

The Rossosphere