Marilyn Yalom, author of How the French Invented Love, dropped me a line to tell me her book has been noticed in high places (read more about it here and here and here).
She’s just been nominated for a Phi Beta Kappa Society Christian Gauss Award, which carries a $10,000 prize. The prize is offered for literary scholarship or criticism.
The other nominated books are are: Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author, by Robert L. Patten; Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, by Claudia L. Johnson; The Long and Short of it: From Aphorism to Novel, by Gary Saul Morson; and The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and the Translation in the Americas, by Vera M. Kutzinski.
Previous award winners have included books written by eminent authors such as Harold Bloom, Christopher Benfey, and Marjorie Garber.
That’s in addition to the earlier news that she’s been nominated for the American Library in Paris Book Award, given to the best book of the year in English about France or the French-American encounter. The 2013 book award jury is high-powered: Diane Johnson, Adam Gopnik, and Julian Barnes.
The winner of the award receives a prize of $5,000. But this may be the best part: the winner is invited to Paris, with air travel and accommodation at the Library’s expense, for an award ceremony on and a public reading.
Both awards will be announced in October. It will be an interesting month. Stay tuned.
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