Memorandum

To: J. Berry

From: Great & Mysterious Powers

Re: The Crawford Award

By the time you see this, you may or may not have slept. The phone call you received last night from Gary K. Wolfe, esteemed science fiction editor and critic (not to be confused with Gary K. Wolf, creator of Roger Rabbit), left you giddy, disorientated, and exhilarated. You were, after all, at a gas station somewhere off Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway when Mr. Wolfe informed you that you’d been named winner of the 2010 IAFA Crawford Award for your novel, The Manual of Detection. You were also parked in a 15-minute parking space—and are these, you couldn’t help wondering as they passed, those fifteen minutes?

Afterward, you went into the gas station, wandered the isles for a while, forgot what you were doing there, and left. You called your brother and mumbled incomprehensibly. You sent a text message to a friend. That text message consisted of the letter “a,” repeated perhaps two dozen times, followed by the letter “h” and several exclamation points. Minutes later, you remembered how to drive, continued onward to New York, missed every exit you were supposed to take, and regained consciousness somewhere in Chinatown. Luckily, you knew the way from Canal Street to your sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, and your sister knew the way from there to a good bar.

The second person perspective has never much appealed to you, but certainly you’ll allow us to communicate this much: that receiving the Crawford Award is one of the coolest things you can imagine happening. No wonder you can’t sleep.

Now get yourself together: the paperback’s out today and you’re giving a reading in a few hours.

•

Some additional information, now being reported by Locus:

The award committee shortlisted Deborah Biancotti’s collection A Book of Endings, Kari Sperring’s novel Living with Ghosts, and Ali Shaw’s novel The Girl With Glass Feet, and wanted to commend two other authors whose works were ineligible this year but were highly regarded: Robert V.S. Redick, whose The Red Wolf Conspiracy appeared in 2008 and whose The Ruling Sea appears in 2010, and Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City originally appeared in Czech in 1993 but was first translated into English by Gerald Turner in 2009.

I’m thrilled and honored to be among the nominees, and deeply grateful to the members of the IAFA for this recognition.