The twenty-third annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night in New York City. Coinciding with this year’s Book Expo America, the awards event brought out over four hundred attendees in celebration of LGBT literature.

Adam Haslett was honored for his novel, Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese), the follow-up to his story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday, 2002), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Eileen Myles, author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, won the award in lesbian fiction for Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (OR Books).

Read more at pw.org.

Tweets from Tahrir , a small paperback containing — mostly — English-language tweets sent by people on the ground in Cairo during this winter’s Egyptian uprising is unexpectedly poignant and moving, and even exciting and suspenseful in places.

Obviously only a small minority of those in Tahrir Square were tweeting in English (and a larger minority were tweeting at all), but through this book, a picture of Twitter as a means of quickly bridging together different constituencies emerges — not everyone was tweeting, but everyone knew people who were tweeting, whether they were in the Square, discovering what was going on elsewhere among the hundreds of thousands of people; or elsewhere in Cairo and wondering if they should take to the streets; or watching from around the world. Twitter, text messages, Facebook and phone calls became a way of shaping the narrative, rebutting the official state media, arguing about the purpose and character of the uprising, and deciding when to hold fast and when to retreat. You get a real sense of Twitter as a thin, somewhat unreliable nervous system that nevertheless turns a crowd into a group capable of explicitly negotiating its actions rather than simply surging to and fro.

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(via The Rumpus)

The book gives you a chance to enter back into instantaneity. That this is nerve-wracking, moving and insightful rather than tedious is because of the quality of the authors but even more, I imagine, the ability of the editors, Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns. A book of tweets sounds like a dumb idea but isn’t at all. It is not going to replace other types of memory, whether an Egyptian-revolution PowerPoint or, say, the excellent Roula Khalaf’s reporting trip back to Tunisia in The Financial Times last Saturday.

Read more in The New York Times Magazine