Twenty-three new MacArthur Fellowships were announced this week, and they included one Random House author and one man who is the subject of a forthcoming Random House book. Honored were fiction writer Yiyun Li, whose understated and elegant stories made her one of Dave’s staff picks when her book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers came out in paperback, and also the subject of writer Neal Bascomb’s new book, Amir Abo-Shaeer, an extraordinary high-school physics teacher who engages his students with an ultra-innovative curriculum.
Mr. Bascomb’s new book is entitled The New Cool and tells the inspirational story of Mr. Abo-Shaeer’s student Robotics team. Yiyun Li’s latest is called Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and has received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly along with being a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.