Dzanc Receives NEA Award

Dzanc Books receives NEA grant to support the publication and promotion of new books of fiction and eBook rEprints

 Grant one of 832 Art Works grants totaling $23.3 million in funding nationwide

Westland, MI— National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Rocco Landesman announced yesterday that Dzanc Books is one of 832 non-profit organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Art Works grant. Dzanc Books is recommended for a $25,000 grant to support the publication and promotion of new books of fiction and eBook reprints. Scheduled authors include Stephen Dixon, Robert Coover, and Ellen Gilchrist. Dzanc Books will publish new print books by Roy Kesey, Merrill Joan Gerber, Eugene Marten, David Ohle, and Jason Ockert; as well as eBooks from Jonathan Baumbach, Abby Frucht, J. Robert Lennon, Greg Johnson, and Michael Martone, among others.

"I'm proud to announce these 832 grants to the American public including Dzanc Books," said Chairman Landesman. "These projects offer extraordinary examples of creativity in our country, including the creation of new work, innovative ways of engaging audiences, and exemplary education programs."

"Dzanc has had the great good fortune of working with some of the best writers of all time and in so doing it has been a fully rewarding experience for us to see both debut authors, as well as such writers as Coover, Dixon, Gerber, Baumbach and Gilchrist, have their works discovered and rediscovered by the reading public," noted Dan Wickett, co-founder and director of Dzanc Books. "We thank the NEA for this grant as well as in general. Their support of independent houses such as Dzanc Books, and the fight for contemporary writers in an increasingly commercial publishing world is a wonderful thing."

In March 2012, the NEA received 1,509 eligible applications for Art Works requesting more than $74 million in funding. The 832 recommended NEA grants total $22.3 million, span 13 artistic disciplines and fields, and focus primarily on the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing works for the benefit of American audiences. Applications were reviewed by panels of outside experts convened by NEA staff and each project was judged on its artistic excellence and artistic merit.

For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov.

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Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and to impact communities nationally with our efforts to advance literary readership and advocacy of creative writing workshops and readings offered across the country. As a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, Dzanc publishes innovative fiction, supports several editorially independent imprints and literary journals, provides low-cost writing instruction to beginning and emerging writers by connecting them with accomplished authors through the innovative Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions, runs a writers-in-residence program that puts published authors in public schools, awards an annual prize to support a writer whose work shows literary excellence and who is engaged in community service, and organizes a writing conference held in Portugal.

For more information on Dzanc Books and its mission, imprints, books, authors, awards, and programs, please visit www.dzancbooks.org. Contact: Dan Wickett, Executive Director & Publisher (dan@dzancbooks.org).

Dzanc Books Black Friday and Beyond Sale

Beginning Black Friday and extending through December 9, 2012, buy X Dzanc titles, get X-1 free.

When you place your order through the Dzanc website, if you order 2 or more titles, follow that up by sending an email to dan@dzancbooks.org and let us know what titles you'd like to accompany those that you ordered, at no additional cost. Titles applies to books in both print and eBook form.

If you order 2 books, send an email about the book you'd like free. If you order 4 books, send an email about the 3 books you'd like for free.

As with all purchases from our website, if you're ordering print books, you will receive the eBook files asap to begin reading immediately while you wait for the good old USPS to get your print copies to you. The free book eBook files will also be included. We do simply ask that you make sure that the books you purchase cost as much or more than the books you are asking to receive as the complimentary copies.

Dzanc to Publish Zakhar Prilepin Through DISQUIET Imprint

September 19, 2012 - Ann Arbor, MI—The Dzanc Books DISQUIET imprint is proud to announce that it will publish San’kya, the award-winning novel by controversial Russian author Zakhar Prilepin.

San’kya is an examination of the elements of rebellion and protest. The novel, drawing on Prilepin’s own experiences, follows Sasha (whose grandmother calls him San’kya), a member of an extremist revolutionary group, as he tests the elemental force of the protest movement in Russia and in himself. San’kya faces a stark choice in the novel’s climax: whether to return to the villages (the unseen Russia) and accept the political fates or to engage the authorities in open rebellion.

Originally published in 2006, San’kya is even more relevant today as a prism through which to view the recent large-scale actions against Putin. It is Prilepin’s first novel and is widely considered his best. San’kya was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Prize and won the Yasnaya Polyana Award and the Best Foreign Novel of the Year Award in China.

Zakhar Prilepin, born near Ryazan in 1975, lives in Nizhny Novgorod where he is the regional editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Prilepin had a varied life before dedicating himself to writing, spending time as a student, as a laborer, as a journalist and as a soldier, serving with the Special Forces in Chechnya. More recently Prilepin has come to the public attention not only as one of the best writers of his generation, but as a committed, and often controversial, political activist on behalf of the 'Other Russia' coalition. His website is one of the most popular author's sites in Russia. Prilepin's combination of lucid prose and social consciousness has made him one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Russia today and drawn comparisons with the Russian classics.

San’kya will be translated from the Russian by Jeff Parker and Alina Ryabovolova and will be published in English in North America in both print and eBook form in January 2014.

Jeff Parker, Editor for the DISQUIET imprint of Dzanc Books, said of the acquisition: "Prilepin is a rabble-rouser and one hell of a writer. San'kya is his masterpiece perfectly capturing a moment and a mood in Putin's russia like nothing else the English world has read."

This signing was made through Zakhar Prilepin's agent, B. Nibbe of Nibbe and Wiedling Literary Agency.

 

About Disquiet

The DISQUIET imprint of Dzanc Books will publish contemporary works from around the world in English translation. The imprint comes out of the annual DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and it’s first title will be the novel A True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires to be published in September 2013 translated by Jaime Braz and Dean Ellis. All titles in the DISQUIET imprint will include introductions by leading figures contextualizing the authors and their stories for American audiences.

Andy Plattner Receives Dzanc Books Mid-Career Novel Award

ANDY PLATTNER WINS DZANC MID-CAREER NOVEL AWARD

August 14, 2012, Ann Arbor, MI—Dzanc Books is pleased to announce that Andy Plattner is the winner of our 2011 Mid-Career Novel Award.  Plattner’s manuscript, Offerings from a Rust  Belt  Jockey, was selected from more than 100 submissions.  This collection will be published in October 2013.

Steven Gillis, Publisher and Co-Founder at Dzanc Books, notes: "Andy Plattner's Offerings from a Rust  Belt Jockey  is a dead on the money infectious novel. The writing is hilarious and  touching, the narrative, and each of Andy's fully realized characters, presents a perfectly pitched tale of love and ambition, honor  and betrayal. The ability to be at once funny as hell and at the same time heartbreakingly accurate in  the depiction of what it means to be human with all of our flaws and  wants and needs is captured with a marksman's eye. Dzanc is pleased and proud to have Andy Plattner asthe winner of our Mid-Career Novel Award."

“Dzanc is a smart, purposeful press,” Plattner said upon winning. “I know my manuscript will benefit from this collaboration.”

ABOUT ANDY PLATTNER

Andy Plattner’s first story collection, Winter Money, originally published in 1997, is set to be re-released in paperback from the University of Georgia Press at the start of 2013. (The collection won the Flannery O'Connor Award in 1997.) His second story collection, A Marriage of Convenience, was  publishedlast year. He has stories in the current editions of The Southern Review and Fiction, have forthcoming work in The Sewanee Review and apt. Plattner lives in Atlanta with his wife, Diana.

FINALISTS

The short list of finalists consisted of novels from Margo Berdeshevsky, Maria Flook, Karen Osborn, Micah Perks, Russell Rowland, Chris Torockio, Mary Troy, and Edra Ziesk.

ABOUT THE MID-CAREER AWARD

While at times it seems the publishing industry is only interested in the next big thing, we at Dzanc recognize the value of experienced writers who have gone through the process of creating and publishing two or more books. Mid-career writers are the backbone of our industry yet often these writers are overlooked and have a harder time finding a publisher than first time writers. More details can be found at www.dzancbooks.org/submissions/

George Saunders on Disquiet

"I can’t imagine anyone with an interest in writing or literature going through the Disquiet program and not being profoundly transformed – by the quality of the teaching, by the magic of Lisbon, and by the way the program is organized, which guarantees intellectual and cultural immersion to an extent unimaginable to the casual tourist.  Disquiet is, to my way of thinking, the very best program of its type in the world: intense, humane, wildly energetic, with its heart in exactly the right place. "--George Saunders