{"id":1237,"date":"2007-05-23T11:23:35","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T16:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/05\/23\/congrats-to-janna-levin\/"},"modified":"2007-05-23T11:23:35","modified_gmt":"2007-05-23T16:23:35","slug":"congrats-to-janna-levin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/23\/congrats-to-janna-levin\/","title":{"rendered":"Congrats to Janna Levin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Madman-Dreams-Turing-Machines\/dp\/1400040302\/\"><img class='alignright' width='180' src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/uploads\/2007\/05\/madman-dreams.jpg' alt='A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines' \/><\/a>  Somewhat overdue congratulations to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jannalevin.com\/\">Janna Levin<\/a>, whose novel <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Madman-Dreams-Turing-Machines\/dp\/1400040302\/\">A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines<\/a><\/em> has been awarded one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pen.org\/page.php\/prmID\/1456\">2007 PEN Literary Awards<\/a>.  (Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.org\/\">Edge<\/a>, via <a href=\"http:\/\/3quarksdaily.blogs.com\/3quarksdaily\/2007\/05\/2007_pen_awarde.html\">3QD<\/a>.)  In particular:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pen.org\/page.php\/prmID\/1308\">The PEN\/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers<\/a> honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work &#8212; a novel or collection of short stories published in 2006 &#8212; represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Bingham Fellowship is one of two big-money (well, over $10,000, which is big money by literary standards) awards given out by the PEN American Center each year; the other is the PEN\/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which this year went to Philip Roth.  Not bad company.<\/p>\n<p>Janna is a good friend, and her novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Godel is an extraordinarily imaginative achievement.  Most importantly, she is a working scientist who refuses to let her curiosity be restricted by the narrow parameters of her day job.  In principle, there&#8217;s no reason why one person shouldn&#8217;t be able to write technical papers about cosmology and black holes <em>and<\/em> create successful literary fiction at the same time;  in practice, however, modern intellectual life is not set up to reward that kind of wide-ranging work, and it takes a great deal of conscious effort to resist falling into one of the comfortable pigeon-holes that academia provides.  Here&#8217;s looking forward to her next book!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhat overdue congratulations to Janna Levin, whose novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines has been awarded one of the 2007 PEN Literary Awards. (Via Edge, via 3QD.) In particular: The PEN\/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work &#8212; a novel or collection of short stories published in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-society","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}