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I love when the major American literature prizes get announced: I gripe very little about omissions or snubs. With only five slots (three for the Pulitzers), no list will please anyone. Instead, I take the prize list as a personal invitation to take up a writer with whom I might not be familiar. I wish newspaper reviewers and columnists would approach the lists the same way, rather than wonder about this or that book that they bothered to take note of only because a major house was really pushing it.

In poetry, the prize lists always serve me well: since I’m not of that world, I need a guide of some kind. The National Book Awards brought me to Alan Dugan, for example, when he was a finalist (and eventual winner) in 2001 for Poems Seven. They brought me to Ben Lerner’s beguiling Angle of Yaw and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler and Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North. My poet friends usually have plenty more to tell me about what I don’t know, but I hang on to the pleasure of discovery. It isn’t very much different from my bookshop days in the 1990’s, when I’d scour the Lambda Literary nominations (back when they sort of meant something), then went looking for those titles at Wordsworth. It helped me build a reading list.

In fiction, the pleasure is even deeper, maybe because I take so much heart and inspiration when the major prizes lift someone out of the fog. This morning, I literally jumped out of my chair when I read that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories was nominated. I’m thrilled because she’s a short-story writer—a very dedicated one—who has been published widely and yet modestly. It’s Lookout Books, a small press out of North Carolina, that published her title this year, and they get to join Bellevue Literary Press and McPherson as presses (those two that brought out Tinkers and Lord of Misrule) that clearly privileged merit over market value and, in doing so, have been richly rewarded in other ways.

Pearlman has been published by Eastern Washington University Press, Sarabande Books, and University of Pittsburgh Press via the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1996 (which is how I discovered her, reading the titles that had won the prize, back when it seemed like the Drue Heinz was the only short-story prize contest around). These are smaller presses with modest distributions, but more important is how they collectively contributed to what big publishing houses always claim to do, but seldom accomplish: nurture and support the growth of a writer.

I’m thrilled to see someone like Edith Pearlman receive recognition like this. It reminds me very much of when Gina Berriault’s Women in Their Beds came out from Counterpoint and ended up winning both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner. I was about twenty-five years old at the time, but I remember sensing even then that some writers are asked to wait in the wings for a long time before being invited out to the national stage. I’ve been irked, too, as I posted this morning on Facebook, that this phenomenon happens most frequently to women writers. But no matter. Pearlman’s nomination means so many good things: more readers for her, some more attention to yet one more small press fighting the good fight, and perhaps even some new converts to the great pleasures and mysteries of the short story.

When I worked in publishing, I was always puzzled about “the fall season,” as if anything the book world could unleash was on par with Hollywood’s “Oscar season,” which starts right after Labor Day. In publishing, the fall books are geared to release and ship just in time for holiday shopping: hence, the glut of big books by big names releasing by mid-November, all of them vying for the same review space, but only a handful getting any sort of consistent traction. It always made little sense to me, especially with big open spaces in other parts of the year, like early summer or January. Take Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite, which Knopf wisely released right at the beginning of 2009. Apart from being a good book, it competed with very little in the bright white of January’s nothingness (at least in the review sections), and that tactic helped sustain attention for the novel all the way through October and the National Book Award nominations.

This year, the fall season in the book world has brought two titles I really have been anticipating. Book glut be damned, I’ve got my eye on Dagoberto Gilb’s new short-story collection Before the End, After the Beginning, which pubs on November 1st from Grove. The other is already out: David Trinidad’s wonderful Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, from Turtle Point.

Trinidad’s volume is the latter of his stunning one-two punch this year. In addition to this volume, he edited A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos for Nightboat Books, a definitive edition for any young poet, but also one imbued with a moving, elegiac, and ultimately instructive quality. Trinidad’s introduction to that volume speaks to his dedication in preserving Dlugos’s work and legacy—the poet died of AIDS at forty—and the extraordinary patience with which Trinidad arranged and ordered Dlugos’s output, awaiting the right publisher. It translates into an act of literary rescue, one poet devoting energy and mind to another who can longer speak for himself—an act, really, of community in the truest and deepest sense.

I said the Dlugos volume was “instructive,” but Dear Prudence has the same feel. To carry each volume is a nod to persistence, to the value of a writer producing poems that, consciously or not, speak to each other across years, across forms, and across subjects—there’s literal weight to this work. The selected poems come from a variety of small presses that published Trinidad’s earlier books before he began being published by Turtle Point in 2000, and I had a hard time not skimming through to revisit poems I knew from Plasticville or The Late Show (books I remember from the late, lamented Wordsworth Bookstore in Harvard Square).

Dear Prudence starts with a section of new poems titled “Black Telephone.” In them are some of Trinidad’s recognizable preoccupations—the allure of sub-narrative in film, the refractive quality of pop music on one’s emotional history, the continual reshaping of the personal past the more one digs into it. But something new (to me, anyway) is the affirmation of influence. A clever framework is a series of poems around Sylvia Plath, a poet whose singular fury functions as a baseline for most of us in our early reading, but whose real power comes only later (mostly in reading her terrible imitators). But seeking models or idols or mirrors in poets like Plath is hardly anything to snicker at. In “Underlined in Sylvia Plath’s Copy of Tender Is the Night” comes a testimony to the power and need for reading, a writer’s ever-present search for the arresting and the startling, often in another writer’s work. It’s no surprise when Anne Sexton, another of those poets who serves as a timeless first-gate-keeper to poetry for many, shows up to comment on all of this in “Anne Sexton Visits Court Green.” Half the fun of the poem is giving over to its authority in depicting Sexton as the cool, serenely acidic woman her pictures suggest she might be, and this blends in perfectly with Trinidad’s lifelong obsession with the movies, with performance and public masks, but also with the spell woven by the mythology of art and its producers.

That world of art can appear anywhere, as suggested by the look Sexton gives to the laburnum in Plath’s garden, the poet’s subject often within striking sight. So it’s no wonder to me that Trinidad finds something worthwhile in producing a haiku for each of the episodes of the Peyton Place television show DVD reissue (“Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera”) and that, embedded in the strange curl of Dorothy Malone’s hairdo, is yet one more space still untouched and undefined by a poet. This book starts to serve, in moments like that, as a testament to maintaining and holding true to a remarkable vision, however idiosyncratic it may seem to the rest of the world. “Fame not necessary,” he writes in “Pink Button,” “for the poems / each word / eye candy / for the literary / pilgrim.” Damn right.

Here’s a quick rundown of some interviews, articles, reviews, and other media for What You See in the Dark, all in a handy-dandy list:

VERY CHOICE BITS

An alumni profile in Harvard Magazine (for all the dirt on how Manuel came from dirt).

A radio interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (if you want to hear Manuel quiver in front of a genius).

A review by the film critic Charles Taylor at the IFC film blog (if you’d like a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims).

A review by the film critic Miguel Rodriguez at KPBS’s Cinema Junkie (if you’d like a consideration of why Psycho is used as the novel’s cultural touchstone).

An invited blog post at the Library of America (if you’d like to see the debt Manuel owes to the great mind of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Manuel’s Juror Favorite selection from the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (if you’d like proof that Manuel’s literary taste includes something other than his own, and also if you’d like to say you appreciated Matthew Neill Null before everyone else did).

Some pictures of Manuel’s work space (in case you’re curious like that).

SOME INTERVIEWS

An interview conducted by fellow writer Jenny Shank over at New West (if you want the scoop on why the hell Manuel did the second person thing).

An interview at TimeOut Chicago (if you want a precise rundown in a glossy, classy mag).

An interview with the lovely Creosote Journal (if you want some more about how Manuel ran across the Petula Clark/Harry Belafonte moment).

An interview with the very popular film blog, The Film Experience (if you want to hear Manuel go on about Robert Altman and the glory of Nashville again).

An interview with Houston’s OutSmart Magazine (if you’d like to get a read on Manuel’s sometimes testy relationship with queer literature).

A video interview with Park City TV in Utah (if you want to judge how jazz-handy Manuel is on camera, or to admire his scuffed boots).

An interview at La Bloga (if you’d like a take on small-town transgressors and a little cachetada at Obama’s tip-toeing).

SOME PRINT AND MEDIA REVIEWS

They loved it at NPR.

They loved it at Publishers Weekly.

They loved it at O Magazine.

They loved it in Cleveland.

They loved it in Philly.

They loved it in Austin.

They loved it in Chattanooga and in Edmonton, Canada (no, really–there are just no links anymore!)

SOME BLOG POSTS

A playlist of film scores is posted over at Largehearted Boy.

A pairing with Chuck Palahniuk at Beverly in Movieland.

A review by Laura Marris at CultureMob.

A review by Lisa Peet over at Open Letters Monthly.

A review (for realzies!) from the very well-read Backlisted.

A review over at Three Guys, One Book.

I’ve said many times that good mentors nurture not only writing, but spirit and heart. I was reminded of that at the end of July while team-teaching with my mentor, Helena María Viramontes, at the invitation of Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. In a week of hard work, gentle debate, and open discussion, Helena demonstrated once again how critiques need not be harsh, how performing the service of reading—especially at the draft stage when a writer is most vulnerable and fragile—is always an opportunity to selflessly reaffirm, to encourage a vision other than your own.

Over at the IFC film blog, critic Charles Taylor shows book reviewers how it’s done with a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims.

At KPBS’s Cinema Junkie, critic Miguel Rodriguez does the same thing in considering the role of Psycho in the novel as more cultural milestone than simple re-enactment.

A huge thanks to both of these gentlemen for their thoughtfulness and their enthusiasm.

Over at the Library of America blog, a guest post about the lasting influence of Gwendolyn Brooks’s gorgeous novel, Maud Martha.

Anything you wanted to know about how a working-class Chicano kid made it through Harvard is all right here. Thank you, Harvard, for acknowledging me as one of your own.

The great Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm posts an interview with me recorded in early April. Nice to be bookended on the program offerings by David Foster Wallace and Marjorie Garber, no?

Well, he did—along with Christine Schutt and A.M. Homes, to boot! The 2011 edition of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories pubs on Tuesday, April 19. Check out your local indie bookstore, buy a copy, and support 20 great writers in the process!

(For those of you who know about the selection process—yes, it is completely anonymous. The story by Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without,” is complete bliss—he’s already sounding like our American masters. Incredible!)

An interview with the film writer Nathaniel Rogers is now up at The Film Experience, complete with chitchat on Psycho, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and film as inspiration.

Over at Largehearted Boy, Manuel posts a playlist of film scores that helped shape the novel.

Algonquin Books shares a great Q&A with author Nina Revoyr, author of Wingshooters.

Houston’s OutSmart magazine offers up a discussion on sensibility, inspiration, and the importance of community.

What You See in the Dark selected as Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week!

Manuel will be one of the featured writers at the PEN/Faulkner Gala Benefit Reading for Writers in the Schools. He’ll join Nicholas Delbanco, Lisa Grunwald, Jane Hamilton, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walter Kirn, Laura Lippman, Audrey Niffenegger, Bich Minh Nguyen, Howard Norman, Z.Z. Packer, and Gail Kern Paster.

A new story, “High Heels Running in the Rain,” will be published by Eleven Eleven in July 2010.

Some trivia: Manuel’s first-year dorm room at Harvard, Matthews 8, was once that of the film director Terrence Malick.

Thanks to the ultracool Salt Publishing, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue releases in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand on November 1, 2009.

Speaking of ultracool, the writer J. Robert Lennon stages yet another of his considerate and thoughtful interviews during Manuel’s October visit to Cornell. Click through for some thoughts on the glories of Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, the complexity of dual identities and the limits of queer lit, and the one-word description of what it’s like to write a novel.

Manuel’s story “Tell Him About Brother John,” which originally appeared in Epoch, has appeared in the 2009 edition of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. The link will take you to an Author Spotlight Q&A.

Manuel answers 20 Questions over at My Latino Voice.

Manuel has received a Whiting Writers’ Award for 2008!!! (Sidenote: The award was sweetly noted by one of Manuel’s favorite bloggers, who posts one of Manuel’s guilty pleasures, Supporting Actress Sundays.)
Manuel has been named a 2008 Fellow in Fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Listen to a terrific podcast of Manuel at the Key West Literary Seminar in conversation with his publisher, Elisabeth Scharlatt of Algonquin Books, on being a new voice, loving old movies, and redefining “American writer”: recorded on January 19, 2008.

The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. An article about the initial shortlist appears right here. An article from one of the judges post-announcement appears over here. And Manuel? Well, it was back to work at his 9-to-5, just like her.

Read Manuel’s email exchange about writing and identity with the blog Homo-Neurotic. Click on the Q&A tab and you’ll find a link to another interview at the flagship blog for many Chicano/a writers, La Bloga.Listen to an interview with Manuel on Houston Public Radio.

Watch a video of Manuel and Helena María Viramontes presenting “Telling Stories That Matter” for the LA Public Library’s terrific ALOUD reading series. The clip is dated August 23, 2007, though the hour-long discussion took place in May 2007.

Read Manuel’s Op-Ed, “Leave Your Name at the Border” (originally titled “Namecalling”) in the August 1, 2007 issue of the New York Times.

Read “Wish You Were Here,” Manuel’s contribution to Out Traveler magazine’s back page column, “The Meaning of Travel,” in the Fall 2007 issue.

Read Manuel’s Author’s Statement for his 2006 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.