Fobbit is a semi-finalist for First Novelist Award

The dream continues.  (Please don't wake me up.)

Fobbit was just named a semi-finalist in the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award competition.  My thanks to all the volunteer readers in the Virginia Commonwealth University English Department, the James Branch Cabell Library, and the Richmond literary community who spent hundreds of hours reading through a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 140 first novels) and who chose Fobbit to be in such fine company.

Congratulations to all the other semi-finalists.  Here's the complete long-list (I've read some of these fine books and all the others have footholds on my mountain of To-Be-Read books sitting in my basement):

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain
Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man by Nick Dybek
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
Fobbit by David Abrams
No One Is Here Except All Of Us by Ramona Ausubel
The Girl Below by Bianca Zander
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung