Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarian
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
by Sheldon S. Wolin
“…a new, comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers.” — Chalmers Johnson
Sheldon S. Wolin is Professor of Politics (emeritus), Princeton University. He has previously taught at Oberlin College and the University of California at Berkeley and served as Eastman Professor at Oxford University. He was founding editor of the journal Democracy. His other publications include The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution and Tocqueville: Between Two Worlds.
Lannan Foundation
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray
“Black Mass… is a limpidly argued and finely written synthesis of Gray’s thinking over the decade.” —John Banville, The Guardian
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics.
Lannan Foundation
Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith
Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher
“In a time of strident pronouncements on the intersection of science and religion, Kitcher has introduced a calm and humane voice.” — H. Allen Orr, New York Review of Books
Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. An eminent philosopher, he is the author of many books on philosophy, science, literature, and music, including Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism; The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities; Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Knowledge; Science, Truth, and Democracy; In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology; and Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring. His most recent book is Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegan’s Wake.
Lannan Foundation
Glenn Patterson
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1961, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from East Anglia University, England. He is the author of seven novels including Burning Your Own (1988), for which he was awarded the Rooney Prize and a Betty Trask first novel prize, The International (1999), Number 5 (2003), That Which Was (2004), and The Third Party (2007). A collection of his journalism was published as Lapsed Protestant in 2006. In 2005 he was elected to Aosdána, which recognizes artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland. A memoir, Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times, has just been published in the UK and Canada.
Lannan Foundation
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, in 1977, and immigrated in 1993 to the United States where his family was granted political asylum. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (2004), which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Kaminsky teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.
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Katie Ford
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition (Graywolf Press) and Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poets & Writers. She has taught at Loyola University, Reed College, and now at Franklin and Marshall College. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Charles D'Ambrosio
Charles D’Ambrosio is from the Pacific Northwest. He has an MFA from Iowa where he currently teaches writing. His short stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other literary journals and have been selected for inclusion in numerous anthologies. His first collection, The Point (1995), was a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2005, he published a brilliant collection of essays called Orphans. Following the release in 2006 of his second book of short fiction, The Dead Fish Museum, D’Ambrosio received the Whiting Award and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the collection was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Lannan Foundation
August Kleinzahler
August Kleinzahler published his first book of poetry, A Calendar of Airs, in 1978. Since then, he has published seven others, including Storm over Hackensack (1985); Earthquake Weather (1989); Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (FSG, 1995); Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998); and Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990 (FSG, 2000). In 2003, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, which won the 2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize and the 2004 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California, and was short-listed for the U.K.‘s Forward Prize in Poetry. His most recent collection of poetry is Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (FSG, 2008). He is also the author of a book of prose, Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (FSG, 2004).
His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Grand Street, The Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review. He has also written essays and criticism for The London Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Sulfur, and The San Diego Reader.
A native of Jersey City, Kleinzahler is the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1989), the Lila Acheson-Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry (1991), and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996). In 2000 he was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship.
Kleinzahler has been a taxi driver, a locksmith, a logger, and a building manager. He has taught creative writing courses at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as to homeless veterans in the Bay Area. He lives in San Francisco.
Lannan Foundation
Radio Telefs Éirann
Seamus Heaney will turn 70 years old on 13 April 2009. To recognize and celebrate this event, RTE has Heaney’s enthusiastic agreement to record him reading his entire body of work. These recordings in CD and MP3 formats will be sold by RTE, broadcast for 24 hours on the actual birthday, and will be the only such complete record of Heaney’s work. A grant was made to support the recording and distribution of the Heaney project.
Lannan Foundation
Trinity University Press
Trinity University Press will be publishing a book, Chinese Writers on Writing, edited by poet Arthur Sze. The book will feature essays with accompanying poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by 39 leading Chinese writers from 1917 to the present. This grant will cover translation and author fees.
Lannan Foundation
Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation
This grant matches a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grant in support of a “Big Read” program in October-November 2008 in honor of the organization’s 30th anniversary. Various events featuring the work of Robinson Jeffers are planned.
Lannan Foundation
Seven Stories Institute
www.sevenstoriesinstitute.com/
To celebrate the centennial of the birth of the American writer Nelson Algren, Seven Stories Institute is planning a series of programs and publications to include the announcement of the 2008 National Book Award finalists at the Algren Fountain in Chicago; various readings and panel discussions of his work at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2009 conference in Chicago; a multidisciplinary event at the Steppenwolf Theater in April 2009 that will be filmed for later DVD distribution; and free distribution of Algren’s books to schools and libraries throughout the country. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, Seven Stories Press, the National Book Foundation, and the Steppenwolf Theater Company are partners in this project and Lannan joins this collaborative effort with grant support.
Lannan Foundation
City of Santa Fe Arts Commission
www.santafenm.gov/index.asp?nid=818
Santa Fe, NM
The city of Santa Fe instituted the position of Poet Laureate in 2006 with private funding and the first poet to hold the two-year position was Arthur Sze. This grant will support the next poet to fill the position.
Lannan Foundation
Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill is an international journalist who has reported from post-invasion Iraq, from the former Yugoslavia where he covered the 1999 NATO bombing, and from post-Katrina Louisiana where he exposed the presence of Blackwater mercenaries. His reporting sparked a Congressional inquiry and an internal Department of Homeland Security investigation. He is a correspondent for the national radio and television show Democracy Now! and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) is his first book.
Lannan Foundation
Sinéad Morrissey
Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. She has published three collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), and The State of the Prisons (2005). Her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award, and the Michael Hartnett Prize for Poetry. She has twice been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Lannan Foundation
Dinaw Mengestu
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), has been nominated for The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Lannan Foundation
Edie Meidav
Edie Meidav’s first novel, The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001), grew out of her time in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her second, Crawl Space (2005), is currently being adapted for film. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, the Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, an Editor’s Choice citation by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and elsewhere, and, most recently, the Bard Fiction Prize for Writers Under 40. She lives with her family in upstate New York where she is a visiting writer at Bard College.
Lannan Foundation
Daniel Alarcón
Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s and elsewhere. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. His story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. The British journal Granta recently named him one of the Best Young American Novelists. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (2001), a Whiting Award (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). He lives in Oakland, California, and his first novel, Lost City Radio, was published in February 2007.
Lannan Foundation
Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna, Sioux and Lebanese descent, is a literary critic, poet, and novelist, and a noted scholar of Native American literature. During a long and distinguished academic career, she edited numerous seminal texts including The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Native American Traditions (1986) and Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (1990) as well as works on poetry and critical essays on Native American literature. She retired from her position as Professor of English/Creative Writing/American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999.
Lannan Foundation
Mike Davis
Mike Davis was born in Fontana, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles in 1946, and is a veteran of 1960’s civil rights and anti-war movements. From his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), about unionism in the United States, to his most recent, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), Davis’ fearless writing in 18 books shines a fresh light on economic, social, environmental, and political injustice. Some of his other books include City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Planet of Slums, Dead Cities, In Praise of Barbarians, and No One is Illegal. He is currently working on a book about climate change, water, and power in the U.S. West and northern Mexico. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.