Young Lion, Never

Sigh.

Nominees for the New York Public Library's 2005 Young Lions Award include Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Madeline is Sleeping, Marc Bojanowski's The Dog Fighter, and Aaron Gwyn's Dog on the Cross.

The library awards the $10,000 prize each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or short story collection.

I'm still unpublished and bearing down rapidly on 40. Sadly, I'll never be a Young Lion. (Or a tyro, an upstart, or precocious.) And "Middle-Aged Lion Who Still Gets Around Moderately Well And Chews His Own Food" just doesn't have that same ring to it.

(Via Maud.)