February 6, 2012—The
Empathy Exams: Essays on Painby Leslie Jamison has been chosen as the
newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Jamison will receive a
$12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essaysin Fall 2013.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor
and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and is given to an outstanding
manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous
books of nonfiction. Last year’s winner, The
Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, will be released
on March 13, 2012.
“Leslie Jamison is a bright young writer whose writing
embodies every element of the qualities we were searching for when selecting a
prize winner,” said Graywolf Press publisher and director Fiona McCrae. “These essays have content and style; reading them, you get the feeling that Jamison is a
writer on a literary adventure.”
The
Empathy Exams explores subjects as diverse as slum tourism, parasites,
medical acting, sentimentality, ultra-running, and drug wars through the lens
of pain. These essays swirl around the physicality of the body and churn
through cultural expectations to find a way to represent pain—and the
accompanying impulse of empathy—without distorting them through narrative
expression. Read more...
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birdsong decries the cruel suicides. In Joanna Rawson’s Unrest, nothing less than the entire world is at risk—risk of
catastrophe, risk of both hellish and heavenly transformations. With visionary
ardor, with devotional precision, Rawson is writing poetry addressed to our
deepest concerns.”
By Per Petterson “[Per Petterson] provides one
of literature’s greatest gifts in his novels—an absorbing interiority that
creates a welcome refuge from our cacophonous world. His books are suffused
with a luxurious, downy silence, a quiet that allows us to slow down and sink
into spare language that evokes complex emotions and primal sensations such as
cold, wet, darkness and light with surprising force.”
By John Haines "John Haines is a master writer, as we have known for years. Now this
book reveals more: a range of intelligence and affection such that I
cannot imagine any reader being unmoved by them. It is a great and
splendid book."—Hayden Carruth
By Rainer Maria Rilke and A. Poulin, Jr. The only definitive volume of Rilke’s French poetry.
"These are poems of meticulous insight and feeling." —Chicago Sun Times
Jamison has been chosen as the
newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Jamison will receive a
$12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essays in Fall 2013.
