Congratulations to Danielle Evans and Aleksandar Hemon for their PEN awards! The prize for a debut work of fiction will be split between Danielle, for her novel Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and Susanna Daniel. Aleksandar received the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career, given to “an author who has published at least three significant works of literary fiction.” Read the full list of winners here.
Huffington Post Books chooses Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling and Danielle Evans’ Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self as having two of the best book jackets so far in 2011. Check out the full list here.
Danielle Evans’ Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize. The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College calls Evans’ debut a “masterpiece in authenticity and immediacy... If Danielle Evans was making her debut on stage instead of with this book, she would receive a standing ovation.” Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered is also listed as a finalist for the prize. Congratulations to both of our Riverhead authors! To check out the 2011 winners, click here.
Congratulations to Danielle Evans for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self being included on the long list for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. More
“Danielle Evans’s whipsmart first story collection charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. . . . Fiercely independent, all of Evans’s characters struggle for a place in a world intent of fencing them out. But as her title suggests, the biggest obstacles they face are often their own selves.” More...
“Whether she’s observing people who work at Ruby Tuesday or Harvard students, Evans is a startlingly good sociocultural mimic. Each story shares a particular female voice: tough, pragmatic, knowing, snappy. . . . There are books that capture our world perfectly, like a scrim over a stage. And then there are books that surprise the audience and go somewhere new, somewhere completely unpredictable. In this collection, Evans paints a picture, sometimes ripping through the fabric. One wonders where she will go next." More...
Check out the feature profile in The Washington Post of Danielle Evans, author of the acclaimed short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
The New York Times included two Riverhead titles in its pages today: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans and Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez. More...
On Evans's book: "The most vivid characters in Danielle Evans’s story collection are in-betweeners: between girlhood and womanhood; between the black middle class and Ivy League privilege; between iffy boyfriends and those even less reliable; between an extended family and living on your own. To say they’re caught between worlds isn’t quite accurate, though; they tend to be hard-headed, sadder but wiser and, most of all, funny."
On Nunez's book: "With a cool, evenhanded tone, Ms. Nunez conjures a near future dark around the edges; during the outbreak, people personalize their germ-protecting surgical masks with silly drawings of lips or vampire fangs, “but a homeless man caught spitting in the street was mobbed and beaten to death. And even in apocalyptic times, parents worry whether a 13-year-old should be spending so much time online."
