Bad Monkeys is #2 in the Pacific Northwest, behind A Thousand Splendid Suns and ahead of Spook Country. In Northern California it’s #14, and in Southern California #12. Still working on the rest of the U.S.
The Book Sense regional bestseller lists just posted
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Nicely done!
I just realized, looking back over the NEA’s list of fiction awards from last year, that you were one of them. I was on the panel of judges that year, along with Peter Beagle and Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson and many others. We didn’t all judge the same submissions, and we read an awful lot, so I don’t know if I was in any part responsible for your getting one, but I hope so. Was it Bad Monkeys that you submitted?
Actually, no, I submitted the first three chapters of Set This House in Order, with the margins and font sizes painstakingly tweaked so they’d fit within the alloted number of pages.
I’m pretty sure you weren’t one of my judges — right after I got the award I emailed you to ask whether you had been, and you said no. But to my way of thinking, just having you on the panel was good for my grant karma, so I drank several beers in your honor anyway.
I did not see them, or I would have remembered, because I was sent the galleys of that book, which pressure from many directions kept me from reading or commenting on, though I liked even then the thirty or so pages I could manage to read.
That was a good year for off-program fantasy writers — Kelly Link won one too, and a couple of other odd persons neither fish nor fowl, like Emily Barton and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.
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