Transcript / LoLT: The Pen America Awards and Two New Books — 02 May 2025

This is a transcription of LoLT: The Pen America Awards and Two New Books — 02 May 2025

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, an otherworldly story collection.

David: WORDS.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

Melissa: In this house, we are Chuck Wendig fans. We’ve talked about several of his books before, but in case you’re not familiar with him or his work, lemme give you a quick overview.

Melissa: He’s an American author from my home state of Pennsylvania, and he often sets his books there. He seems to be a genuinely kind, intelligent person who’s very generous with other writers. [DAVE] And he writes books that are dark, dark, dark.

Melissa: Like Stephen King, he has a gift for writing absolutely bat-shit stories populated with characters that feel like real people. He creates people you want to hang out with and then completely mucks up their lives with nasty villains or traumatic events, often with an uncanny slant.

Melissa: He’s written a duology about an apocalyptic disease, a supernatural family drama, an urban fantasy about a girl who can see the death of anyone she touches,a techno-thriller about killer ants, and my current favorite, ‘Black River Orchard,’ a horror novel about apples that are so delicious they destroy people’s lives.

Melissa: His new one is ‘The Staircase in the Woods.’ The setup is irresistible to me: It’s 1998 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A group of five ride-or-die friends are out camping when they discover a staircase In The Woods. Matty, their charismatic and impulsive de facto leader climbs the stairs and… disappears. As you might expect, the friends drift apart. Until 20 years later — when a new tragedy compels the friends to reunite. They go back to the woods and find another staircase. This time… they all climb.

Melissa: The Guardian said that what lies at the top of the staircase is ‘pleasingly nightmarish and very messed up.’

Melissa: I heard Chuck discussing this book on a podcast. Even though it’s clearly a horror novel, it’s also an examination of friendship — specifically, the bonds that can form among friends when we’re young and inseparable, brought together by the big and small traumas of being a kid. The book opens with a preface, and I want to read a snippet:

Friendship is like a house… You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space… and you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are… You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation… Frienship, like a house, can go bad, too… Gets bad enough, one or all of you have ot move out. And then the place just sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear is all down and start again.

Melissa: If you like a group of tight-knit friends whose outsider status brings them together — like the Goonies or It or Stranger Things — and you’re up for the delicious thrill of being scared, this sounds like a good one. It’s The Staircase in the Woods’ by Chuck Wendig.

David: My book this week is ‘I See You’ve Called in Dead’ by John Kenney. As you might have guessed from the title, this is a funny book. I have to confess: I am not usually a fan of funny books. I suspect it’s a character flaw of mine. I do like books that are funny but usually only when the humor is layered with something else. Like ‘The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float’ by Farley Mowat. That’s funny. But it’s also an adventure story. The funny isn’t the point; it’s the flavor.

David: And, honestly, that’s how I feel about this book. At first glance, it reads like it’s a quirky little comedy. And it is. But there’s also a little more going on. You might not see that right away, especially if you’re going off the blurb or even the first few pages, but hang in there.

David: The story centers on Bud Stanley. Bud is a middle-aged obituary writer for one of the news agencies in New York City. Bud’s life is not going great. When the book opens, he’s on a painful blind date. His date is 45 minutes late. When she finally shows up, she explains that she was late because she was reconciling with her ex-boyfriend. He’s some dialogue from that scene:

“Well, one drink and we’ll get you on your way.” I winked at her like we were old friends. I was floundering badly, watching myself, a kind of out-of-body experience where I was repulsed by this person. Me.

“No, I mean he’s waiting for me. He’s outside.”

“He’s outside now?”

“Yeah.” She looked over to the door. “Actually, it looks like he’s made his way inside. There he is.” She smiled and waved at him. I did the same. So did the bartender.

“Cool,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on a blind date where someone brought their boyfriend.”

“Well, former boyfriend.”

“I’d say invite him over for a drink, but you probably have plans.”

“We do.” We both smiled and nodded and looked back over at her ex-boyfriend.

“He’s very handsome,” I said, regretting it immediately.

“Isn’t he? I will tell him you said so.”

David: So, after that debacle, Bud goes home, pours himself a Scotch. And then another. In a moment that is both darkly funny and unexpectedly poignant, he writes his own obituary. He makes up stuff he wishes he had done. He claims he was a founding member of Tears for Fears, one of the original Pips for Gladys Knight, and fluent in seven languages. And then—because of Scotch, sadness, and reflex—he sends it. He posts it to the paper’s internal systems.

David: The next morning, chaos. Bud’s boss wants to fire him immediately. But he can’t. Because the agency’s administration system has logged Bud as dead, and, apparently, you can’t fire a dead man. Bud has triggered his own death. The newspaper wants to sue him. His friends and family are angry at him. It’s a mess.

David: What unfolds is a sort of midlife redemption arc. Bud leans into his work. He starts going to funerals—not his own—and finds strange comfort in them. He makes new connections. He tries, in fits and starts, to piece his life back together. It’s a little How Bud Got His Groove Back, but with obituaries and emotional honesty.

David: One of the pleasures of this novel is its strong sense of place. The Brooklyn of right now is fully alive on the page—funny, cranky, complicated. You feel like you’re walking around the neighborhood with Bud, watching him slowly unstick himself.

David: John Kenney, the author, is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. His debut novel ‘Truth in Advertising’ won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He’s also known for satirical poetry collections—Love Poems for Married People, Love Poems for Anxious People. So he knows his way around both jokes and feelings.

David: And that’s why I’m into this book: it’s funny, but it’s also about grief. About loneliness, and middle age, and the weird little moments that remind us we’re still alive. There’s a little ‘Six Feet Under’ in here. A little ‘The Office.’ A little ‘Less’ by Andrew Sean Greer.

David: It just came out a few weeks ago. If you want something that’ll make you laugh, feel things, and maybe send a weird late-night text to your best friend, give this one a go. It’s I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney.

David: And now our Distraction of the Week.

David: The Pen America Literary Awards are coming up! The 2025 ceremony will be held on May 8 — next Wednesday, if you’re listening to this near release day. PEN America will be awarding over $350,000 in prizes to authors across a wide range of categories. And maybe more importantly, giving the kind of weight, of gravitas that can really change a writer’s career.

David: So I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just do a quick rundown of some of the books that are nominated and move on.’ And friends, there are rabbit holes within rabbit holes on this one. So let me walk you through a few things I learned and what I found interesting about this year’s awards.

David: First, a bit of history. I’ll admit—I didn’t know much about PEN America beyond the name. It turns out, it’s part of PEN International. That was founded back in 1921 in London. That was just after World War I, and the idea was simple and kind of beautiful: maybe we could understand each other a little better if we read each other’s books. Poets, Essayists, Novelists. That’s where the acronym came from. PEN America started up the following year, in 1922. Today, their 4500 members include journalists, playwrights, translators, publishers—and, as they say, ‘devoted readers and supporters.’

David: Pen America is an active advocate for issues around writing. If you go to the Pen America site, the first thing you’ll read is, ‘PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.’ They take on first amendment issues, and book banning. They have programs that promote writing in jails and teach media literacy to counter disinformation. It’s a literary organization with the heart of a civil rights group.

David: Now about the awards. And, yes, this could get confusing. There are lots of Pen organizations. PEN Ireland, PEN England, PEN Portugal, PEN Hungary — you get the idea — and many of them have their own awards. There’s also the PEN/Faulkner Award, which is its own thing. That award spun off back in the 1980s, in protest of the American Book Awards, which some writers felt were getting too commercial. PEN/Faulkner does its own ceremony, and their winner gets announced on May 15.

David: Are we done with the confusion? Not yet! Within Pen America, there are a bunch of awards, many of which have wildly specific names. So, for instance, there’s the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. There’s the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. There’s the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. It amuses me no end that the writer organization has incredibly confusing names for its awards.

David: At the top of the PEN America pyramid is the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. This is the big one: $75,000 for a single work that pushes boundaries, challenges convention, and has lasting impact. Only three books are nominated this year, and they are wildly different from each other. Let’s start with:

David: ‘Dead in Long Beach, California’ by Venita Blackburn. This is a debut novel. We follow a woman who discovers her brother has died and then begins replying to his text messages as if she were him. It’s got grief, disconnection, and a very meta structure. Blackburn plays with form in some wild ways—fake social media posts, broken timelines, imagined conversations. One of the reviews said, ‘Reading this novel was like having a conversation with a brilliant hyperactive person who is a bad listener and I couldn’t follow the half of what was being said but somehow, on a level more fugue than semantic, the story cohered into a reading experience something like attending a poetry slam in a foreign language with which I have only a passing familiarity.’ Four stars.

David: Next up is ‘With My Back to the World: Poems’ by Victoria Chang. This poetry collection is a tribute to Agnes Martin, who was an abstract artist. The poems respond directly to Martin’s paintings. Like, many of the poems have the names of Martin’s works. Chang is speaking to the art, and sometimes through the art. It’s intimate and cerebral and emotional all at the same time. It was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year, the Guardian named it one of their best poetry books of the year, and — in a very weird plot twist — it was a Today Show pick.

David: Finally, we have ‘On Freedom’ by Timothy Snyder. If you recognize his name, it might be from ‘On Tyranny’. Snyder is a historian who writes about despots and democracy. In ‘On Freedom,’ he looks at what freedom means in modern life. The book walks a fine line between having a lot to say, but being surprisingly readable, like an after-hours conversation with your favorite brilliant professor. He weaves in REM, Frank Zappa, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury—and connects ideas from Kiev to Washington D.C. It’s very current — maybe you’re having conversations like this in your home — and it never feels like homework.

David: If none of these titles grab you, there are plenty of other PEN Award categories to explore. Debut fiction, essays, memoir, science writing, translation—the list goes on. We’ll put a link in the notes. And if you’re curious, the winners will be announced at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony in New York City on May 8. If you’re in the area, tickets are available. You can go rub shoulders with some brilliant writers.

David: And if you’re the kind of person who wants to support literary freedom — because book banners suck! — consider joining PEN. For $50 a year, you can become a ‘reader member’ and be part of this community that champions the power of empathy through writing.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on the books we talked about today and how you can engage with the awesome work of Pen America.

David: Thanks for joining us in the Libary of Lost Time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Pen America.