"Untitled (Structures)," a new film installation by Leslie Hewitt in collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young is on show at The Menil Collection, Houston, January 25 through May 5; Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House), is among the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle book awards for 2012; publications: Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman--from World War to Cold War(Knopf) by Michael Dobbs, an account of the pivotal period spanning the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War; and the German translation of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany by Atina Grossmann is published by Wallstein Verlag - a Germany book tour is scheduled for March.

Project Z: The Final Global Event, a documentary film by James Der Derian and Philip Gara premiered at DOK Leipzig on November 1, 2012; new release: the latest recording Almost Truths and Open Deceptions (Tzadik) by composer Annie Gosfield; Henri Cole was awarded the sixth Annual Jackson Poetry Prize by Poets and Writers, Inc.; Calvin Trillin was awarded the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his book Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff (Random House); Anne Applebaum and Katherine Boo are 2012 National Book Awards finalists in the nonfiction category. Publications: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (Doubleday, October 2012 / Penguin Books, November 2012) by Anne Applebaum; Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, October 2012) by Brigid Cohen; and an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides on his recent work and a selection of his recommended books in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Annie Gosfield will deliver a portrait concert featuring the premiere of "Phantom Shakedown" from the new Tzadik CD at the Moving Sounds Festival in New York on September 14 with Roger Kleier, Ches Smith, and The Pearls Before Swine Experience; World premiere and new recording herald the 2012-13 season for composer Michael Hersch - next concert on September 7 at Spectrum Records in New York; Ha Jin will read from his new novell Nanking Requiem and from A Good Fall on September 7 and September 8 in Berlin. New publications: Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (MIT Press, September 2012) by Devin Fore; Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (It Books, August 2012) by Todd Gitlin; Thirty Poems (New Directions, June 2012) by Christopher Middleton (translator) Robert Walser (author); And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen (University of Chicago Press, September 2012) by Charles Molesworth; and The Life of Objects (Alfred A. Knopf, September 2012) by Susanna Moore.

New publications: Farther Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of essays and lectures by Jonathan Franzen; As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, Journals and Notebooks from 1964-1980 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff; Jeffrey Herf on the Günther Grass controversy in the New Republic; Kirk W. Johnson's documentary about the List Project premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival; on show: Reynold Reynolds "Made in Germany Zwei" at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, May 16 through August 19; Jenny Holzer "Endgame" at Sprüth Magers Berlin, April 27 through June 16; Aaron Curry "Buzz Kill" at Michael Werner in New York, May 1 through June 23; Derek Chollet joins Steve Simon on the NSC's Syria policy team; the Academy congratulates alumni Peter Maass and John Wray for winning a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as Andrew Norman and Tod Machover for being finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music.