Designers & Books Fair

Tickets for the inaugural Designers & Books Fair (October 26-28, 2012 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan) go on sale this Saturday, September 1.

At the Fair, some of the field’s most notable names—Todd Oldham, Simon Doonan, Andre Leon Talley, Michael Graves, Billie Tsien and Paul Goldberger-- will come together to talk about architecture, fashion, graphic design, interior design, landscape architecture, product and industrial design, and urban design through the lens of a lasting format—the printed, tangible page.  The programming curators of the event include Michael Bierut, Wendy Goodman, Paul Goldberger, Steve Heller, and Valerie Steele. The Fair is the brainchild of Steve Kroeter, founder of the popular website designersandbooks.com, which has received over 1 million page views from people interested in books as sources of inspiration for creativity, innovation, and invention.

Publishers will have their latest and most popular design titles available for sale and authors will be signing books.  Rare and out-of-print book dealers will also be exhibiting and selling.  Attending publishers include ACC, Actar, AMMO, Artbook DAP, Bauer & Dean, Lars Muller, MIT, Paint Box, Norton, Princeton Architectural Press, Rizzoli, and Thames & Hudson.

For more details about the Fair visit www.designersandbooks.com/bookfair.  

2012 PEN Literary Awards

The PEN American Center announced the winners and runners up for the 2012 PEN Literary Awards. This year PEN will present 18 awards, fellowships, grants and prizes, including two awards offered for the first time ever: the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and the PEN/Steven Kroll Award for text in an illustrated picture book. Winners and runners-up will be honored at the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on October 23 in New York City. See a complete list of winners and runners-up here. Highlights include:

PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction ($25,000): Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (Red Lemonade)
PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction ($25,000): E.L. Doctorow
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000): The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon) 
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($5,000): Arguablyby Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie (Random House)
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game by Dan Barry (Harper)
PEN/Steven Kroll Award Honoring the Author of an Illustrated Children's Book($5,000): Never Forgotten by Patricia C. McKissack (Schwartz & Wade Books)