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Two Penguin Group (USA) Authors Are Among the Five Finalists for the New York Public Library's 2008 Young Lions Fiction Award

Ron Currie, Jr., author of God Is Dead (Viking) and Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead), are among the five young literary talents chosen as finalists for the New York Public Library's 2008 Young Lions Fiction Award, honoring the works of authors age 35 and under who are making an indelible impression on the world of literature.

Each year, five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelists Han Ong, Helen Shulman, and last year's winner Olga Grushin (who won for The Dream Life of Sukhanov) a Putnam/Marian Wood title, will select the winner of the $10,000 prize.

The winning writer will be announced on April 28th at a ceremony hosted by Young Lions co-founder and actor Ethan Hawke, to be held in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences in New York.

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So last week I visited my publisher in New York City to sign copies of Hold Tight for my wonderful sales force and for bookstores who special ordered them.

I walked into the room, pen akimbo-- and the table of books you see here was what greeted me.

"Wow," I said, taking the photo below with my phone.

"Oh that's only about half of them."

I sat down and got to work. As I came upon my second hour of signing, someone asked, as someone inevitably does, "Isn't your hand getting sore?"

The honest answer: No.

My hand only gets sore when NO ONE wants me to sign a book. I still remember my early days, sitting in some Waldenbooks at a mall, no one approaching me, trying to look busy, playing with my pen, straightening out my untouched pile of bookmarks, feeling something like the authorial equivalent to a poster child ("You can buy his book...or you can turn the page...").

Originally, 52 Ways was to include more on language. All underworld slang is vital, but the lexicon of card cheating is, to my ears, especially zippy and inspired. The perps are cozeners and jugglers, sharks and sharps, grifters and mechanics, rounders and itemers, painters and artists. Cheating specialists play the lights with twinkles and glims (reflectors), or slip ice and bombs (fully stacked decks) into the game. The hustler can burn, beat, and buffalo his victim, the hapless cony, dupe, patsy, gull, sheep, lamb, pigeon or fish. Steeped in this intoxicating linguistic stew it became far too easy to turn out sentences in which mechanics hustle fish, cozeners buffalo pigeons, and sharks burn sheep. It's not a bad thing that most of this ended up on the cutting room floor.

View more information on 52 Ways to Cheat at Poker

Allan Kronzek

52 Ways to Cheat at Poker

cards

cheating

poker

scams

card sharp

Penguin Books

books

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Riverhead author Junot Díaz has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The announcement was made officially this afternoon at the 92nd annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music at Columbia University, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which Riverhead Books published on September 6th, went on to become one of the most critically-acclaimed novels of 2007. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last month, won the Mercantile Library Center's John Sargent Prize for First Novel, and was a 2007 New York Public Library "Book to Remember." In addition, Díaz's novel was named a best book of 2007 by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Daily News, and a host of other top dailies. It was also chosen as one of the top 10 books of the year by Time, People and Entertainment Weekly, among others.

In her review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: "'Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets 'Star Trek' meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed.. An extraordinarily vibrant book." Time magazine called it "astoundingly great" and "the novel of the year."