Five Young Literary Talents Chosen as Finalists for The New York Public Library's 2009 Young Lions Fiction Award

(New York, NY) February 18, 2009 - The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the ninth annual Young Lions Fiction Award. The award honors the works of authors age 35 and under who are making an indelible impression on the world of literature. The winning writer will be awarded a $10,000 prize on March 16, 2009 at a ceremony hosted by Young Lions co-founder and actor Ethan Hawke, held in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
The finalists for The New York Public Library’s 2009 Young Lions Fiction Award are:

Jon Fasman, The Unpossessed City
Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances
Sana Krasikov, One More Year
Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Salvatore Scibona, The End

The award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. Each year five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelists André Aciman, Lore Segal, and last year’s winner Ron Currie, Jr. (who won for God Is Dead), will select the winner of the $10,000 prize. See below for more about the finalists.

Winners from previous years include: Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov; Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation; Monique Truong, Book of Salt; Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector; Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated; Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days; and Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves.

About the Young Lions
The Young Lions is a membership group at The New York Public Library for supporters in their 20’s and 30’s. Young Lions programs celebrate the work of young writers, artists, and innovators in various fields who are making an impact on our culture and society. By participating in special events and activities, Young Lions contribute to the life and vitality of the Library. Information about the Young Lions group, including events and forums, is available online at www.nypl.org/joinyl or phone 212-930-0885.

About The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award is a $10,000 prize awarded each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Established in 2001, this annual award recognizes the work of young authors and celebrates their accomplishments publicly, making a difference in their lives as they continue to build their careers. The Young Lions Fiction Award was founded by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland. The Award is made possible by an endowment created with generous gifts from Russell Abrams, Nina Collins, Hannah and Gavin McFarland, Ethan Hawke, Stephan Loewentheil, Rick Moody, Andrea Olshan and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.

About The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers – The Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library – and 87 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items, including materials for the visually impaired. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The New York Public Library serves over 16 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 25 million users internationally, who access collections and services through the NYPL website, www.nypl.org

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Contact: Jennifer Lam 212.592.7708 | jennifer_lam@nypl.org

Additional Author and Book information

Jon Fasman, The Unpossessed City
In The Unpossessed City, Jim Vilatzer is working in his father's Rockville, Maryland restaurant after a failed romance, trying to earn enough cash to pay off a $24,000 gambling debt. In an attempt to earn more money, Jim uses his Russian language skills learned in college to get a job in Moscow with the Memory Foundation to interview and record the stories of former political prisoners. A series of interviews draws him into a far-reaching scheme involving the abduction of retired Russian nuclear and biotech scientists. The bio-thriller aspect of the plot provides a loose frame for Fasman's real concerns: Jim's personal, romantic and espionage relationships and, more importantly, the trials and tribulations of the new Russia itself.

Jon Fasman was born in Chicago in 1975, and grew up in Washington, D.C. He was educated at Brown and Oxford Universities and has worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., New York, Oxford, and Moscow. His writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Slate, The New York Times Magazine, the Moscow Times, and The Economist, where he is an online editor. His first novel The Geographer’s Library, was published in more than a dozen languages.

Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her—or almost exactly like her—and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain the original Rema is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love. Atmospheric Disturbances is at once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind. With compassion and literary sophistication, Rivka Galchen investigates the moment of crisis when you suddenly realize that the reality you insist upon is no longer one you can accept, and the person you love has become merely the person you live with. This highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships, and how we spend our lives trying to weather the storms of our own making.

Rivka Galchen, the daughter of Israeli immigrants, grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Galchen attended Princeton, received her M.D. at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2003, and was then offered a Robert Bingham fellowship to study in the MFA program at Columbia Universitye. After graduating from Columbia, she received a Rona Jaffe fellowship in fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Open City, and BOMB, and her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Scientific American, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times.

Sana Krasikov, One More Year
One More Year is Sana Krasikov’s debut collection of short stories, made up of stories of people who hold out hope, despite the odds, that life will be kind to them. The characters who populate Krasikov’s stories are mostly women–some are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents. Almost all of them look to love to repair their lives, and when love isn’t really there, they attempt to make do with relationships that substitute for love.

Sana Krasikov was born in the Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and in the United States. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Fulbright Scholarship. She lives in New York City and is at work on her first novel.

Zachary Mason,The Lost Books of the Odyssey
With brilliant prose, a rich body of authorial knowledge, and a terrific imagination, Zachary Mason has fashioned a book that might have been one of the classics of world literature, if only it actually dated from the time of Homer. Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, The Lost Books of the Odyssey features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece. The result is an elegantly written, frequently beautiful book, justifying comparison with the great postmodern fictive hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover.

Zachary Mason has a B.S. in math and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. He does research in computational linguistic semantics and is VP of Research at a Silicon Valley start-up. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is his first book. His first muay thai fight is in April.

Salvatore Scibona, The End
A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a P.O.W. camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet in the carnival crowd, each of whom will come to their own unique conclusion on this day. The End follows them across the seven preceding decades—an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler—and dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all of their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken family loyalties and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly more—through the eyes of the people in the crowd.

Salvatore Scibona’s fiction has been published in the Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize. The End is his first book.