Welcome!

Congratulations on your acceptance into the prestigious ranks of the Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Award Selection Committee!

We have prepared the following guidelines to aid you in your selection of a Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Award shortlist. Please read them closely and follow them throughout your selection process.

Residency Requirement

We believe that, as New York City is the world capital of the literary arts community, a strong Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Award shortlist should contain 50 – 60% writers affiliated with New York City. This affiliation can come through birthplace, college attendance, or current residence. For the purposes of the Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Award, New York City will be defined as Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Diversity Guidelines

The shortlist must contain a literary artist who comes from one of the following communities:

– African-American
– Other “Writers of Color”
– Blue-collar
– Foreign-born
– Southern
– LGBTQ
– Female

The Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Foundation is strongly committed to promoting diversity in the literary arts, and our Diversity Guidelines help ensure that we continue to advance this cause; we regret that the Fotherington-Vanderbilt Weiss Literary Arts Award Selection Committee will be unable to consider more than one writer who meets a Diversity requirement, with the exception of white female authors, who may comprise 25 – 35% of the shortlist (space permitting). Please make your selections accordingly.

Illicit content

Graphic depictions of sexual content are permissible so long as the sex is joyless, deviant, or between an older male literature/creative writing professor and a young female student. (The latter is strongly encouraged.)

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There is perhaps no book I find more joy in revisiting than Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. I have seen every single film adaptation thereof, including the Brendan Fraser remake (both the regular and 3D version). As a child, I sometimes whispered the name Arne Saknussemm to myself when I was alone, as both a prayer and a talisman. I was bitterly disappointed when I learned in fourth-grade science class that the Hollow Earth Theory had been soundly disproved some hundred years earlier.

Journey has everything a book should have: giant mushroom forests, a ton of trilobytic fossils, dinosaur battles, underground oceans, mysterious chambers of light, boiling rivers, volcanos, a guy named Hans.

One thing that struck me about the book as a child, and continues to strike me now is how often the narrator passes out from hunger or exhaustion or shock. It seemed to me that as I cast my mind over the Victorian- and Regency-era adventure novels of my youth, the delicate male protagonists spent almost as much time drifting into unconsciousness as they did naming new species or describing what remained of their provisions. We may never know why men fainted so often in Victorian novels, but we can at least count how many times it happened. Therefore I have taken it upon myself to go back and record how often the heroes of my favorite science-fiction and adventure books pass out. The winner shall be awarded the Fainter’s Crown. Journey To the Center of the Earth seemed the perfect opening candidate; let us begin.

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Spring has sprung. Summer has lingered. Fall is falling. And winter is coming.

It’s back-to-school time for all of the little children (and many of the grown-ups like me, who have traded in reading the things we like to read for the things that we have to read). Fall also heralds in the back-to-school bigots who are interested in banning all the good books, and using all manner of explanations to avoid telling the real and actual truth.

I love to read. More than anything (except maybe sleeping). I read a lot. As much as I can. As a child I read some awful books, some books that probably shouldn’t have been published, some books I was far too young to read (Hey, Mom! Ten is too young to read The Collector), and some books that scared me real good. But, as my number-one childhood phobia was dying before I read all of the books in the world – I know, I, know, get a grip, Jessie- I quickly developed a taste for serious books about adult topics, and I was rarely, if ever, worse off for having read them. Excepting The Collector, of course.

Every year I am filled with a sense of hopelessness about the books that end up getting banned for reasons that have nothing to do with the official excuses. Because, books. They are the best. And they are especially the best when they speak to the experiences of those reading them, or that allow folks to walk away with a better understanding of the world and the experiences of all the people living in it.

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“He couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about the old boy’s eccentricity. This Lord Worplesdon was Florence’s father. He was the old buster who, a few years later, came down to breakfast one morning, lifted the first cover he saw, said ‘Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!’ in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France, never to return to the bosom of his family. This, mind you, being a bit of luck for the bosom of the family, for old Worplesdon had the worst temper in the county.”

-Jeeves Takes Charge

“He had another go at the glass. It didn’t seem to do him any good.

‘If only this had happened a week later, Bertie! My next month’s money was due to roll in on Saturday. I could have worked a wheeze I’ve been reading about in the magazine advertisements. It seems that you can make a dashed amount of money if you can only collect a few dollars and start a chicken-farm. Jolly sound scheme, Bertie! Say you buy a hen. Call it one hen for the sake of argument. It lays an egg every day of the week. You sell the eggs seven for twenty-five cents. Keep of hen costs nothing. Profit practically twenty-five cents on every seven eggs. Or look at it in another way: Suppose you have a dozen hens. Each of the hens has a dozen chickens. The chickens grow up and have more chickens. Why, in no time you’d have the place covered knee-deep in hens, all laying eggs, at twenty-five cents for every seven. You’d make a fortune. Jolly life, too, keeping hens!’ He had begun to get quite worked up at the thought of it, but he slopped back in his chair at this juncture with a good deal of gloom.

‘But, of course, it’s no good,’ he said, ‘because I haven’t the cash.'”

-Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg

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