October 25, 1994

Contact: Craig D'Ooge (202) 707-9189

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Three 1993 Syndicated Fiction Project Award Winners To Read Their Award Winning Short Stories in the Final Syndicated Fiction Project Program at the Library of Congress

Max Apple, Richard Bausch, and Faye Moskowitz, authors of three of the "Ten Best" short stories in the Syndicated Fiction Project, will read their stories on Thursday, November 17, in a program co-sponsored by the Library's Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and the Syndicated Fiction Project. The reading will be in the Mumford Room, sixth floor, Madison Building at 6:45 p.m. Tickets are not required.

Max Apple, whose award-winning story is "Proton Decay," has been Fox Professor at Rice University in Houston since 1972. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1970, and is the author of The Oranging of America and Other Stories (1976), Free Agents (1986), Zip, A Novel of the Left and the Right (1986), The Propheteers: A Novel (1987), and Roommates: My Grandfather's Story (1994). Mr. Apple has also written a stage play and two screenplays. Mr. Apple's awards include a 1986 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Richard Bausch, who will read "The Knoll," is the author of Rare & Endangered Species: A Novella and Eight Short Stories (1994) and the short-story collections Spirits And Other Stories (1987) and The Fisherman's Wife And Other Stories (1990). His six novels include Mr. Field's Daughter (1989), Violence (1992), and Rebel Powers (1993). Mr. Bausch is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award and an award form the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Filming has recently been completed on the movie version of his 1984 novel, The Last Good Time, starring Maureen Stapleton and Lionel Stander. He has been a member of the creative writing faculty of George Mason University since 1980.

Faye Moskowitz, a former commentator on National Public Radio, directs the creative writing program at George Washington University. In addition to editing Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters, Ms. Moskowitz is also the author of And the Bridge Is Love: Life Stories, A Leak in the Heart: Personal Essays and Life Stories, and the short story collection Whoever Finds This: I Love You. The story she will read, "And Go Seek," is the second short story for which she has won a Syndicated Fiction Award.

This year's Ten Best stories were chosen by Josephine Carson, herself the author of three novels, the nonfiction work Southern Black Women, and many short stories, essays, and poems. The recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, Ms. Carson has taught at Bennington College, the University of California at Berkeley, Mills College, and San Francisco State University; she is now at work on the "biography" of a river in the Netherlands, titled The Way of Water.

The Syndicated Fiction Project, which was created by the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 to celebrate a rekindled interested in short stories and has been sustained by the Endowment as a special project for the past 12 years, will cease operation at the end of the year; this reading will mark the final Annual Best reading. Beginning next year, "The Sound of Writing," the radio show launched by the Project in cooperation with National Public Radio, will be produced by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.

The Project administered an annual contest to gather the best contemporary short fiction for dissemination nationwide. A total of 741 stories by 530 writers from all 50 states has been represented. The Project acted as an agent on behalf of the chosen, unpublished manuscripts, distributing them to hundreds of local outlets via several media. From 1982 to 1991, 28 newspapers throughout the U.S. published more than 475 stories. In 1987, "The Sound of Writing," a half-hour radio program featuring two stories and hosted by Alan Cheuse, was launched. The Project has produced 156 of these programs which air on approximately 90 National Public Radio affiliates around the country.

In 1991 the Project launched an anthology series based on the radio program, with Doubleday/Anchor. Two volumes have been published, edited by Project Director Caroline Marshall and by Alan Cheuse. The first volume, The Sound of Writing, was published in 1991; the second, Listening to Ourselves, appeared in 1994.

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PR 94-167
10/19/94
ISSN 0731-3527