BTW News Briefs

Finalists for Great Lakes Book Awards Announced

On July 20, the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA) announced the finalists for the 2004 Great Lakes Book Awards. The awards will be presented Friday, October 8, at a luncheon during the GLBA Fall Trade Show in Dearborn, Michigan. The winners will be announced in late August.

The finalists in the Fiction category are:

• Something Rising: Light and Swift, Haven Kimmel (Free Press);
• The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffennegger (MacAdam/Cage Publishing);
• True North, Jim Harrison (Atlantic Monthly Press);
• The Turtle Warrior, Mary Relindes Ellis (Viking);
• Ursula Under, Ingrid Hill (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill);
• You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon (Ballantine).

The awards luncheon will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Friday, October 8, 2004 at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan. Winners will receive promotion in the association's holiday catalog, $500, and an award designed and produced by Pewabic Pottery, a historic maker of art tiles, ceramics and glazes, based in Detroit. For more information and the complete list of finalists, visit the GLBA Web site at www.books-glba.org/ or contact Jim Dana, GLBA executive director, at (616) 847-2460, or via e-mail, at [email protected].

PEN to Present "State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings"

The PEN American Center recently announced that it will hold a special evening of readings in support of free expression and "America's core freedoms," called "State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings." The event will be held on Wednesday, August 4, at 7:00 p.m., in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The presentation -- which will include a plethora of well-known writers, such as Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Salman Rushdie, Monique Truong, Kurt Vonnegut, and more -- looks to raise awareness about grave threats to essential freedoms in the United States.

This event is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. For more information, contact PEN at (212) 334-1660, ext. 107.