The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for their 2014 Young Lions Fiction award: Matt Bell, Paul Yoon, Anthony Marra, Chinelo Okparanta, and Jennifer duBois. The winner will be presented with the prize at the library on June 9th.
The Royal Canadian Mint honors Alice Munro with a silver coin that shows “an ethereal female figure emerging from a pen.”
V. V. Ganeshananthan remembers her friend Matthew Power (a young journalist who died while on assignment in Uganda earlier this month), by taking a close look at one of Power’s stories for Harper’s Magazine, “Mississippi Drift,” and trying to figure out exactly what makes it so good.
At the New Yorker, Stacey D’Erasmo writes about how great women artists and writers restlessly change their artistic form and style over the course of their careers and considers why this may be: “There’s a doubt, a shadow, a friction between the inner world and the perception or the shape of the exterior container. That shadow between feeling and form, which may begin in gender, releases artistic energy all one’s life.”
The Fulbright Program faces a budget cut of thirty million dollars, or thirteen percent. Slate’s Rebecca Schulman argues that we can’t afford to lose the “soft diplomacy” the program offers: “As tensions escalate with countries that were once touchy allies, what we need are more Fulbright grantees in the world, not fewer.”
Buzzfeed lists the six little magazines you ought to be reading: The New Inquiry, The American Reader, Hazlitt, Worn Journal, Scratch, and Dissent.