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August 2013
Latest News

Albert Murray Dies at 97

Albert Murray

Essayist, critic and novelist Albert Murray passed away Monday in his Harlem home at the age of 97. Influential as a critic of "black separatism," Murray was also an accomplished novelist (The Spyglass Tree and The Magic Keys) and memoirist (South to a Very Old Place). Click here to read his full New York Times obituary.

John Hollander Passes Away at 83

John Hollander

Influential and prolific poet John Hollander passed away in Branford, Connecticut over the weekend at the age of 83. The author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, including his most recent collection A Draft of Light (2008), Hollander taught at Yale University, Connecticut College, and Hunter College. His full obituary can be read at the The New York Times.

2013 PEN Literary Award Winners

2013 PEN Literary Award Winners

The 2013 PEN Literary Award Winners have been announced and 3 Random House authors have won! Katherine Boo won the John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Leonard Mlodinow won the E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Subliminal; Tom Reiss won the Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for The Black Count. The award winners and runners-up will be honored at the 2013 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Monday, October 21, 2013, at CUNY Graduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium in New York City.

Pauline Maier Passes Away at 75

Pauline Maier

Historian Pauline Maier passed away this week at the age of 75. Maier taught for over thirty years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published a great variety of works including The Old Revolutionaries and the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist American Scripture which explores how the Declaration of Independence became the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. Her full obituary can be read on The New York Times.

Adrian Bejan on Discovery's Through the Wormhole

Design in Nature

Adrian Bejan, who discovered the constructal law of design and evolution in nature, was featured recently on an episode of the Discovery Channel series Through the Wormhole. The following 8-minute clip from the episode "Did God Invent Evolution" features a segment with Bejan discussing the constructal law. For a more in depth dissection of constructal law check out Bejan's groundbreaking Design in Nature which takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how this single principle of physics accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world.

In Brief
In a news conference, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced an agreement with the family of Henrietta Lacks that will restrict NIH-financed research on the HeLa genome. Two members of Lacks' family will serve on the HeLa Genome Council, marking the first time tissue donors have had a voice in the process and finally giving the Lacks family a say in how Henrietta's cells are used. To learn more about this landmark announcement for which author Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has played such a large role, please read the following articles: The HeLa Genome: An Agreement on Privacy and Access from the NIH, Nature Magazine, and The New York Times.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society has announced the short list of books for their 2013 awards. Three Random House LLC titles are on the short list for The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Random House), Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham (Random House), and Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (Crown). In addition, The Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science short list includes The Age of Insight by Eric R. Kandel (Random House). Each award carries a $10,000 prize. Winners will be announced on October 2nd and the authors will be honored at a gala dinner on December 5th in Washington, D.C.
Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, addressed the United Nations in New York City on June 25th, 2013 about how to better manage global migration as part of its Panel Discussion on International Migration and Development. Click here to watch Nazario speak to the UN General Assembly (Nazario appears at 23:50).

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