Indies Choice Winners: Atkinson, Marra, Rowell and More

Publishers Lunch

The Indies Choice Award winners (and related ABA-selected E.B. White Read-Aloud Award winners) were named, for formal presentation at BEA. Additionally, indie bookstore benefactor James Patterson will be honored with the Indie Champion Award. The winning books and authors are:

Adult Fiction
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books)

Adult Debut
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)

Adult Nonfiction
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown (Viking)

Young Adult
Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell (Griffin)

Middle Reader
Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo, K.G. Campbell (Illus.) (Candlewick)

Picture Book
The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt, Oliver Jeffers (Illus.) (Philomel)

People: On Marquez, 87, and More

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 87, died at home in Mexico City on Thursday, following complications from pneumonia. Among the many appreciations of his work and life are these from Michiko Kakutani and Hector Tobar.

Hillary Clinton's June 10 memoir has a title -- HARD CHOICES and a final jacket: "All of us face hard choices in our lives," she writes. "Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become."

Author Jesmyn Ward will join the faculty of Tulane University on July 1 as the first to hold the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professorship. In the new position, she will also will work closely with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Newcomb College Institute. Ward currently lives in DeLisle, Miss. and works as assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama.

Colm Toibin will take over as chairman of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature starting in 2015. Salman Rushdie has led the festival since it was founded in 2005.