BTW News Briefs

First Amendment Loses a Champion

Barney Rosset, the founder of Grove Press who fought groundbreaking legal battles against censorship, died Tuesday in New York City at age 89.

Under Rosset’s guidance, Grove Press became “one of the most influential publishing companies of its time,” observed the Los Angeles Times. “It championed the writings of a political and literary vanguard that included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Tom Stoppard, Octavio Paz, Marguerite Duras, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X.” Rosset was also the founder of Evergreen Review, a literary magazine that published early works by writers such as Susan Sontag and Edward Albee.

In the late 1950s and ’60s, Rosset fought legal battles for the right to print unexpurgated versions of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

PEN/Faulkner Announces Fiction Finalists

The five finalists for the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, announced this week, are:

• Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco)
• Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (Scribner)
• Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Steven Millhauser for We Others: New and Selected Stories (Knopf)
• Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)

The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction honors outstanding works of fiction by American writers each year. The finalists were chosen by a three-member jury of their peers. The winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced on March 26. The four finalists will receive $5,000 each.

The 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Ceremony will be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library on May 5.