LITERATURE: Robert A. Caro·Joy Williams

FOREIGN HONORARY MEMBERS: Salman Rushdie

The following Random House authors have received awards by the academcy in literature:
ACADEMY AWARDS IN LITERATURE ($7500 given to honor and encourage creative work): Dan Chiasson·Rikki Ducornet·Edith Grossman·Mona Simpson

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER AWARD IN LITERATURE ($20,000 to a prose writer for achievement and dedication): John Edgar Wideman

MILDRED AND HAROLD STRAUSS LIVINGS ($50,000 a year for 5 years to two writers to devote their time exclusively to writing): Madison Smartt Bell

MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL AWARD IN LITERATURE ($10,000 to a writer of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies): Ben Marcus

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States. The Academy's purpose is to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists. This is done by administering awards and prizes, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding stage readings and performances of new works, and purchasing works of art to be donated to museums.

Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man (Random House Trade Paperback), has been awarded a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, which celebrates exceptional books by writers of color published in the United States. Sponsored by the Open Book Program, this award also helps to insure that "those who are the custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people".

Knopf author Cynthia Ozick has been awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award, which celebrates the accomplishments of a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents achievement in a variety of literary genres and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation will also be honoring Ms. Ozick with the 2008 PEN/Malamud Award. This prize recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation recently awarded Kate Christensen with their 2008 award for Fiction for her novel The Great Man (Anchor).

Finalists include:
Julie Kavanagh, author of Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon Books), for the The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography , which is a biennial prize of $10,000 given to a distinguished biography possessing notable literary merit.

Peter Constantine for the PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Italian of The Essential Writings of Machiavelli by Niccolo Machiavelli (Modern Library).

Other Press is the publisher of outstanding works in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from the U.S. and around the world that represent literature at its best. They also publish books about the history of ideas, literary theory, philosophy, religion, politics, and human rights. Many of their publications explore the effects of globalization on postmodern society, and are informed by perspectives stemming from a variety of cultures.

Other Press books are available on this site and may also be viewed on the publisher's website: http://otherpress.com/

Nonfiction
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington (Doubleday)

Autobiography
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)

Random House finalists included:

Fiction: In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar — Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner — Autobiography: A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya — Biography: Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee; Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 by John Richardson — Criticism: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella

Every year the NBCC presents awards for the finest books and reviews published in English. Click here for a list of current and past winners and finalists.

Made to Stick is a creative guide to communicating ideas effectively, and is an ideal candidate for this pilot program because each chapter offers valuable stand-alone lessons on the key principles that make messages "stick".

Its six chapters and Epilogue will are now available for $2.99 each at www.randomhouse.com/madetostick. The introduction and index will be available at no charge to those who buy at least one chapter.

Click here to download the Made to Stick teacher's guide.