#literary-awards

#literary-awards

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joan Silber reads her story " Safety," from the December 8, 2025, issue of the magazine. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, Silber is the author of nine books of fiction, the most recent of which are the novels " Mercy" and " Secrets of Happiness."

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro Panamanian American poet and playwright whose books include Stepmotherland, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and an International Latino Book Award, and Migrant Psalms, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Bruce Smith joins Kevin Young to read "Open Letter to My Ancestors" by Mary Ruefle, and his own poem "The Game." Smith, the author of eight poetry collections, including the forthcoming "Hungry Ghost," has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The press, then known as Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken a chance on the book, which had been rejected by numerous other houses. The initial print run was somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 units-modest expectations that looked justified when, in the first year, sales barely cleared 2,000. This despite getting positive reviews in the New York Times and The New Yorker and being assigned to freshman classes at the City College of New York.