The Shirley Jackson Awards finalists have just been announced and PS Publishing and Tor take top spots with four nominations each.

UPDATE: If you count Joe Hill's story from Postscripts magazine, PS Publishing ends up with five noms.

The awards, established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.

In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson's writing, and with permission of the author's estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards were created by a group of like-minded individuals, however who those individuals are is being kept mum by awards administrator JoAnn F. Cox.

As for why we need another award, I found some answers on the Shirley Jackson Award Blog:

Over the last few years, dark fiction has returned, and is even popping up on the best-seller lists. Big publishers are paying attention, and acquiring titles they wouldn't have touched with ten-foot poles in the 90s and early 00's. Dark fiction is getting serious critical attention. The New York Times' Book Review initiated a semi-annual column devoted to horror. So, now seemed like a good time to start an award honoring those works of fiction that would likely be overlooked by Booker Awards and Pen-Faulkner Awards as well as Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, but whose merit, often brilliance, is undeniable.

And so, the Shirley Jackson Awards. Ms. Jackson's work represents everything we seek in our nominees. Smart, dark, and able to tread the line between psychological and visceral with aplomb. Not only was her short story "The Lottery" published in The New Yorker, but it also elicited the most hate mail that magazine has ever received. Now that's a writer.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson "one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers."

The nominees for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards are listed after the jump.

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Last night, the Mystery Writers of America threw their annual banquet to celebrate the presentation of the Edgars at the Grand Hyatt, with an hour or so of cocktails and mingling outside the grand ballroom beforehand. That's where four of the five nominees in the best novel category—Ken Bruen, John Hart, Michael Chabon, and Reed Farrel Coleman—got together for a friendly group shot. (The fifth nominee, Benjamin Black, was not in attendance.) I ran into Lee Goldberg, the chair of the MWA awards committee, just before snapping this pic, and he told me he knew who all the winners were, and that there'd be plenty to get people talking as the results were announced. Did that mean, I wondered, that Chabon was going to snag an Edgar to go along with last week's Nebula? "I can't tell you that," he said, laughing as he made his way back into the crowd.

Ultimately, the prize went to Hart's Down River; see the full list of winners. (I was glad Hart and I got to meet in person before the banquet, two years after I interviewed him over the phone for Publisher's Weekly. )

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The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, "the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace," announced earlier this week that Pulitzer-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch would be the recipient of the third annual "Lifetime Achievement" award, a distinction he shares with Studs Terkel and Elie Wiesel. Branch is most famous for his trilogy of books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American civil rights movement—Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge—and is currently working on a book of friendly conversations with Bill Clinton.

Nominations are still open for the regular $10,000 prizes in both the fiction and nonfiction categories, but only until tomorrow, so start that ball rolling now! Once all the nominees are in, a panel of judges will select the winning books for a ceremony in September, which is also when Branch will formally receive his prize.

While the AJC might have gotten rid of Theresa Weaver, Atlanta hasn't given up on books and TV is picking up the slack the paper let out. Karen White's new book, The Memory of Water, is the book club pick selection for NBC affiliate 11 Alive's Atlanta & Company. Presented in conjunction with Borders Books & Music, the club selection is featured throughout the month in all Atlanta area Borders stores. Capping the shared month of reading, White will appear on Atlanta & Company to talk about The Memory of Water, with host Holly Firfer on Wednesday, May 28th. Now that's market saturation, especially when Weaver's review of the book is scheduled for the May issue of Atlanta Magazine.

Sarah Reidy, Director of Publicity from Soho Press, reports from Baltimore on the Malice Domestic Agatha Awards.

I had the pleasure of attending the Agatha Awards Banquet for Malice Domestic XX on Saturday, alongside Soho's Marketing Director, Ailen Lujo. Despite the fact that the organizers had forgotten to assign Ailen and I seats, all worked out for the best. We found ourselves at table 44, alongside Jim Huang - owner of The Mystery Bookshop in Carmel, IN and a great Soho supporter. Later on, Margaret Maron - author of the Deborah Knott mystery series - and friends dropped in to occupy the empty seats. I had the pleasure of chatting with Ms. Maron's husband, who recounted stories of mystery conventions past for me.

Find out who the award winners were and what was for dinner after the jump

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"It's very hard to create something beautiful in this world," Ethan Hawke told the nominees for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award last night, "and you all have done it, and we're in your gratitude." (Earlier in the ceremony, he'd joked that after actors had read excerpts from the five shortlisted books, "we're all going to applaud for the one you like the most.") And then, when NYPL CEO Paul LeClerc announced that the $10,000 prize, awarded annually to a fiction writer under 35, was going to Ron Currie, Jr. for God Is Dead, a collection of linked stories about what happens to the world when the titular proclamation comes true, squeals of delight arose from the Viking table.

The money's going to take a while to arrive, though: LeClerc informed the audience that dummy checks were being handed out at the ceremony because, at last year's party, two of the runners-up managed to lose their $1,000 consolation prizes. (This, some of the guests might have said, is what happens when you have plenty to drink and nothing to eat but mixed nuts; one publicist and I were seriously contemplating whether or not we should run across the street and bring burritos back from Chipotle.)

With the annual PEN gala and the Triangle Awards taking place the same evening, the crowd was a bit subdued, but one could still spot some major literati. Amanda Peet was one of the celebrity readers, so David Benioff was in the audience, and I took the opportunity to talk to him about City of Thieves, which I had just started reading. Given that the opening scene is narrated by a screenwriter named David who's romantically involved with an actress, how much of the subsequent story, in which that character's grandfather recounts his experiences during the siege of Leningrad, is true? Very little, Benioff admitted, beyond the fact that his grandparents are from there and now live in Florida—but it's still a great literary device, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the story turns out. I also caught a glimpse of essayist Sloane Crosley, who I'm told is on the library's Young Lions Committee; I went over to ask her about that, but by the time I'd finished chatting with somebody else and turned around, she'd wandered off to another corner of the hall.

It's official—Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the first novel nominated for an Edgar, a Hugo, and a Nebula, has picked up that Nebula, which means he's been recognized by the Science Fiction Writers of America not just as one of their own, but one of their best. The Edgars will be awarded later this week: Will the Mystery Writers of America give him equal props?

And the nominations keep coming: Chabon just received a nomination for this year's Sidewise Awards, presented annually to works of alternate history. No wonder people are starting to think, as one humorous blog post puts it, "the impending conquest of true literature over speculative fiction is at hand."

Subterranean Press - and works published by them - have made the final list in no less than five different categories for the Locus awards. Including best Magazine and Publisher. The winners will be announced at the Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle, June 21st.
In today's mailbag I received a few upcoming titles from Subterranean including: The Best of Michael Swanwick (Swanwick is nominated for best short story and collection) along with Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons (best novella).

The results may not be in for the Edgar, the Nebula, and the Hugo, but earlier this week Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union took home the California Book Award gold medal for fiction, with the silver going to Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Other winners in the 76th annual presentation of the awards, honoring "the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers," included Ralph Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad and Pulitzer winner Daniel Walker Howe for nonfiction, debut novelist Porochista Khakpour, and poet W.S. Di Piero—with special, out-of-category commendation for Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Psalms.

Yesterday, judges for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, awarded annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that engages the subject of gender in new and thought-provoking ways, selected Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North as their 2007 winner. The novel, which was published last year in the U.K. as The Carhullan Army, had already won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for literary writers under the age of 35, and is still on the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain's most prominent SF prize.

When she began writing it as a short story, Hall told me last week, during the first leg of her American tour, it felt completely different—not only was she used to writing historical fiction, she had never written in the first person before. "And after about 10,000 words," she said, "I realized it wasn't going to turn where I thought it would; more ideas kept coming."

The novel is set in a dystopian future in which Britain has suffered an economic collapse in the wake of environmental disaster and is reduced to accepting airlifted foodstuffs from an American government under the control of Christian fundamentalists. Registered citizens are confined to urban centers, and the women have been fitted with contraceptive devices to regulate reproduction. The novel's protagonist (known only as "Sister") decides to seek out a rural community of women farmers in the remote northern countryside that turns out to be fiercely radical, blurring the lines between freedom fighting and terrorism; Sister tells her story after she has been recaptured by the government.

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