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Enter your manuscript now for the chance to win a $25,000 publishing contract with Penguin Group (USA)

Amazon.com, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) will be accepting contest manuscripts from now through midnight EST on February 8th for the second annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition seeking the aims next popular novel. Writers around the world are encouraged to enter now!

How the contest works

Go to www.amazon.com/abna to enter your unpublished, English-language fiction manuscript. Entries will be accepted until February 8, 2009 or until 10,000 entries have been received, whichever comes first. The contest consists of four judging phases by expert reviewers, publishing professionals, and Amazon.com customers. The winner, who will receive a $25,000 publishing contract with Penguin Group (USA), will be announced on May 22, 2009.

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So what do you want to talk about today?  How about Alexander Selkirk?

The first question may strike you as odd, but it's as worth pondering over breakfast as what you'd like for dinner.  Simply asking it will sharpen your awareness of your world and what intrigues you in it.  And when it comes to that next encounter, be it at the coffee stand, over the watercooler, or warming up before a boardroom slam dance, you'll have a distinct advantage.

To love conversation is to appreciate that every person you meet is a portal to another world, that every encounter is a potential adventure.  It can make you happy because it fills life with possibilities - whether shooting the breeze with strangers, or resolving dilemmas, whether burnishing ideas or aceing job interviews.

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An important note to those who are tracking this season’s Oscar race: Groundhog Day came out in 1993, the same year as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and as far as I can tell from a couple of totally random and lazy Google searches, it received zero Oscar nominations.

Let’s consider this. No Best Actor nomination for Bill Murray? Not even a Best Screenplay nod for a script that has since been hailed as one of the most structurally brilliant and philosophically beguiling pieces of screenwriting in the past 20 years?

This should tell us a lot about the bogusness of Oscar mania. I can think of so many movies from the last couple of decades that have held up terrifically, over time, but which never had a prayer of being named Best Picture: Flirting with Disaster. Election. Boogie Nights. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Breaking the Waves. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Waiting for Guffman.

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Viking’s Sebastian Barry Wins Costa Book of the Year Award for The Secret Scripture

The Secret Scripture by Viking's Sebastian Barry has won the prestigious 2008 Costa Book of the Year award. Barry accepted the award this past Tuesday, January 27th at an awards ceremony in London, where the chair of the judges said: "Sebastian Barry has created one of the great narrative voices in contemporary fiction in The Secret Scripture. It is a book of great brilliance, powerfully and beautifully written." The award is accompanied by a £25,000 cash prize.

The Costa Book Awards recognize the most enjoyable books of the last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. Originally established by Whitbread PLC in 1971, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UK's prestigious and popular book prize in 2006.