What’s New With James Cañón?

A year and a half ago, James Cañón wrote a guest essay for Beatrice about writing Tales from the Town of Widows while he was still learning to become fluent in English. This spring, I found out that the novel had wound up on the shortlists for both the the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and the Lambda Literary Award in the debut gay fiction categories—and just now I’ve learned that Cañón was named as a finalist in LatinoStories.com‘s “One Brown Book, One Nation” (a program tied into Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins today), and was the winner of France’s Le Prix des Lecteurs Vincennes. Congratulations, James!

15 September 2008 | uncategorized |

“Make Sure That You Are Sure of Everything I Do”

(It’s a Mission of Burma reference. Really.)

At the risk of coming across as self-aggrandizing, I just wanted to mention that Beatrice is no longer the only online platform I’m using to talk about books. I’ve also got a profile at Goodreads.com where I’m posting mini-reviews of books as I read them, and a Twitter microblog that I find myself using to post quick updates from readings and other literary events. Some of you have probably stumbled onto one or both of these already, but I hope other readers might want to give them a look—I consider them a great opportunity to spread the word about books and writers that, for whatever reason, I don’t wind up writing about at length here.

14 September 2008 | housecleaning |