Justin Cronin has been awarded the 2002 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his story collection, Mary and O’Neil (Dial). The award is presented annually to a first work of fiction, and includes a prize of $7,500.

Rugged Land Publisher Shawn Coyne wants people to pay attention to books the way they pay attention to music videos. That’s why Rugged Land, a book publishing and film company, created a 40-second commercial trailer for one of its debut novels, Henry’s List of Wrongs, by John Scott Shepherd. The promo is due for release on the Rugged Land Web site on April 16 to coincide with the book’s publication date.

The nominees were recently announced for the 2002 International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Awards, the winners of which will be announced on April 20. There are 33 nominees in 11 categories.

Nominees in the General Category are:

Ann Patchett has won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Bel Canto, which was a Top Ten Book Sense 76 selection last year. The prize awards the writer $15,000, making it the largest juried award for fiction in the U.S.

Make no mistake, notwithstanding its witty title, A Child’s Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper (Scribner) is definitely not a tale for little ones. This Book Sense 76 March/April selection is a story that mingles animal characters from children’s books with true crime elements -- a gruesome murder, an unexplained disappearance -- and perpetual human dramas -- the search for truth and the loss of innocence.

Well, the big news here is that this spring and summer sees a wonderful bounty of great new books coming out, in cloth and paper … which is great for biz but daunting nonetheless. So, we’re going to produce a separate Summer Paperback 76, covering late May-July, as there is so much good stuff coming in paper, too. The paperbacks would’ve swamped the May/June 76, keeping dozens of worthy new hardcovers off.

When Cicely Buckley of Oyster River Press set out to publish the entire Walking to Windward chapbook series in one fell swoop, it was a major undertaking. But she couldn't resist adding 11 titles to the original group, ending up with an extraordinary enterprise -- 21 poetry chapbooks encased in four box-set volumes each containing four to five individual titles.

"I don't know of any other series like this," she told BTW, about publishing more than 600 pages of poetry in six months for a December 31 publication date.

Nominees for the seventh annual Firecracker Alternative Book (FAB) Awards, have been announced. The awards honor the best in alternative publishing in such categories as Sex, Drugs, Music, Graphic Novel, and Zine in addition to the traditional categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poety. The deadline for votes is April 20, and awards will be presented at BookExpo America on May 3 in New York City.

Among this year’s nominees are:

FICTION

On March 20, at a ceremony held at the New York Public Library, author Colson Whitehead was honored with the Young Lions Fiction Award [YLFA] for his novel John Henry Days (Doubleday). Established in 2001, YLFA awards a $10,000 prize to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Remarkably, this year, all the nominees for YLFA were also Book Sense 76 picks. John Henry Days was a July/August Book Sense 76 pick.

Nominees were announced, on March 14, for the 2002 James Beard Foundation Awards, now in their 12th year. The announcement was made at a reception held at the historic James Beard House in Greenwich Village, New York.