Carrie K. of Brooklyn, NY won Emma Straub’s The Vacationers

Ellice Y. of Corinth, MS won Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me

Helen M. of Tewksbury, MA won Ted Thompson’s The Land of Steady Habits

Jennifer Chen T. of Cherry Hill, NJ won Jean Kwok’s Mambo in Chinatown

Midori C. won Caeli Wolfson Widger’s Real Happy Family

Farnsworth L. of Amherst, MA won Mira Jacob’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

Tracy M. of Minneapolis, MN won Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans

Colleen B. of Vestal, NY won Alexi Zentner’s The Lobster Kings

Tammy G. of San Diego, CA won Courtney Elizabeth Mauk’s Orion’s Daughters

Christy H. of Buford, GA won Scott Cheshire’s High As The Horses’ Bridles

Marni A. of Scranton, PA won Megan Abbott’s The Fever

Katie R. of Brooklyn, NY won Edan Lepucki’s California

Annalisa B. of Brooklyn, NY won Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year

Elizabeth B. of New Milford, CT won Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2 A.M. At The Cat’s Pajamas

Kristin A. of Westwood, KS won Kevin Clouther’s We Were Flying to Chicago

Liz K. of Oak Park, IL won Porochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion

Pedro R. of New York, NY won Brian Gresko’s When I First Held You

Alina C. of Brooklyn, NY won Courtney Maum’s I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

Kristy B. of Wilkes Barre, PA won Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

Pedro R. of New York, NY won Robin Black’s Life Drawing

Jason R. of Lexington, SC won Nicole C. Kear’s Now I See You

Chelsea H. of Cheverly, MD won Julia Fierro’s Cutting Teeth

Laura K. of Bartlett, TN won Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s Bittersweet

Today (May 8th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s novel Bittersweet. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through today.

AND THERE’S MORE!!! We are so pleased to announce that tomorrow, in addition to announcing the grand prize winner of all 24 books, we will also announce ten runners-up, all of whom will win a copy of Bittersweet!

About Today’s Book: Bittersweet

“Before she loathed me, before she loved me, Genevra Katherine Winslow didn’t know that I existed,” begins Mabel, the narrator of Bittersweet, Beverly-Whittemore’s mesmerizing gothic thriller. A scholarship student, Mabel coexists in an uneasy truce with her roommate “Ev,” the wild, willowy daughter of blue-blooded New Yorkers. But an unlikely friendship takes root when Ev suffers a family tragedy and invites Mabel to Winloch, the private lakeside camp where generations of Winslows have summered in Vermont. The girls settle in at Bittersweet, the cottage that Ev has inherited, but there are hints of trouble surrounding the Winslows. Even as Mabel falls for camp life—the family dinners, swimming, fireworks and boating—she realizes things are not what they seem. Why does John, the handyman, install multiple dead bolts on the cottage doors? Why does Ev’s aunt ask Mabel to sort through family papers to find evidence of “blood money?” And what does an old diary reveal of the family’s past? Mabel’s enchantment fades as she pieces together evidence of a family’s malevolence and she wonders who can be trusted when someone is willing to keep the family’s secrets hidden. Bittersweet is worth savoring—it unfolds like a long summer day, leisurely revealing the dark.” – People Magazine

“What begins like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep quickly warps into a sickly addictive thriller… think ABC’s Revenge when it was good, only more scandalous… With books like Bittersweet to stuff in beach bags, it’s beginning to feel a lot more like summer. A-” —Entertainment Weekly

A Short Q & A With Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

What is the title of your book? Why?

I really wrestled with what to call my first two novels; neither were published under their working titles. But Bittersweet has always been Bittersweet; the title stuck from the moment I knew this was going to be a book, and I think it’s because the word works on multiple levels. Bittersweet is: a plant found up around Lake Champlain (where the book is set); the name of the cottage in which much of the book is set; the name of a real cottage that I grew up around (in the place that I’ve fictionalized for the novel); and, most importantly, it’s an emotional state that worked as a lodestar as I was writing the book. I also love that it’s a word made up of opposites. There’s a quiet war in the middle of it, and that sums up the novel as well.

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

The estate where Bittersweet is set, Winloch, is based on the place where my grandparents have owned land since before I was born (it’s the only home anyone in my family has lived in consistently over the course of my lifetime). It’s a beautiful lakeside retreat where my family comes together every summer, and it couldn’t be any more blissful. But how’s this for the strangeness of the imagination?: I knew, as soon as I wanted to write about the family at the center of Bittersweet, the Winslows, that 1) they live in a very dark version of this place, and 2) they are decidedly NOT nice people. It’s been a real trip to transform a place so close to my heart into this kind of nefarious, mean, fairytale version of itself.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

I’m proud of Mabel, the main character of Bittersweet, who is slippery and hard to like and defiant and nosy and quick to judge and lonely and many other things besides. She’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing someone who feels “real.”

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

This book was my attempt to write the kind of book I love to read on vacation, books like Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Books that are well-written with a driving narrative line. Big plot.

A few years ago, I realized that another similarity shared by many of the books I love is the central conceit of an outsider trying to get into an elite circle. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, for example, or the three books I’ve listed above. Kate Christensen’s The Great Man. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

I was thrilled by how these books made me ache for something I didn’t even know I wanted—to get “in”—even as I was rooting for the striving characters at the center of each book to have their comeuppance, to be brought back down to my level. Every time I read a book like this, my pulse would increase at that tension, and I realized I wanted to write a book of my own that addressed the same conceit. And so Mabel Dagmar was born…

More About Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the author of three novels: Bittersweet (May 2014), The Effects of Light (2005) and Set Me Free (2007), which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best book of fiction by an American woman published in 2007. A recipient of the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, she lives and writes in Brooklyn and Vermont. In addition to her website (which you’re on right now!), check out (and submit to) her web project about female friendship, FriendStories.com, and visit the Bittersweet Booklaunch Blog, a case study about the year leading up to publication. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

In Bittersweet, Mabel Dagmar longs to belong to her best friend’s family, the Winslows – read about the book here. Have you ever wanted to belong to an inner circle? Did you make it in? If so, did you have to sacrifice anything to get there?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s novel Bittersweet. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 8th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (May 7th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Julia Fierro’s novel Cutting Teeth. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Cutting Teeth

“Fierro’s first novel captures the complexity of forging new friendships and redefining lives as contemporary parents. Her characters are meticulously drawn, the situations emotionally charged. Readers won’t be able to look away.” – Booklist 

“When a group of thirty-something parents gather at a ramshackle beach house called Eden, no serpent is required for the sins, carnal and otherwise, to pile up. Fierro argued in The Millions last year that writers need to put the steam—and the human sentiment—back into sex scenes in literary novels. You may want to keep Fierro’s debut novel on a high shelf, away from children and prudish literary snobs.” – The Millions

“Entertaining, wise, heart-breaking at times, Cutting Teeth is an outstanding debut. Julia Fierro’s particular genius is her ability to understand and render the vagaries of the human heart.” – Therese Anne Fowler, author of the bestselling Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Timely and observant, Julia Fierro’s debut feels like real life. She captures the anxiety of our times with the authority, insight—and humor—of lived experience.” – Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles

A Short Q & A With Julia Fierro

What were the seeds of this book?

My life, of course. There are many autobiographical elements in Cutting Teeth. I am a mother to young children. I live in Brooklyn. I worry too much and scrutinize my choices as a parent, just as many of the novel’s characters do. There is a part of me in every character—both the women and men. Almost always, that “part” is a trait of my own that I am working to understand, and writing through that mystery in my characters in how I inform myself of myself. Like many writers, I learn through writing. It is how I make sense of myself, the world around me, and my place in that world.

What innovation in this book are you most proud of?

I’m most proud of the way I integrated the online world into the characters’ experiences in Cutting Teeth. This is really surprising to me, because if you’d asked me five years ago about the use of the Internet in literary fiction, I would’ve been all snobby about it. Using online message boards, forums, websites, and even cell phone texts, felt so organic to the world I needed to create in Cutting Teeth. The characters are desperate to hide certain secrets from their friends and partners, and the Internet is a safe (most of the time) place where they can find a release in sharing these secrets. And I had so much fun designing and formatting the online sections. When I received the finished books in the mail, they were the first pages I flipped to.

When did you first know you were a writer?

I’ve always known I was a storyteller because I’ve been a relentless consumer of stories since I was a child. Through television, books, and observing (sometimes, eavesdropping on) other people. When I wasn’t reading or watching TV as a child, I was spending hours dreaming up drama with my Barbie dolls. I had five Barbies and only one Ken, so I wove some twisted tales of envy, heartbreak and revenge.

Being a writer wasn’t something I thought possible growing up. My parents hoped I’d become a lawyer, my brother a doctor. These were secure professions at that time, and many children of immigrants (my father emigrated to America from Italy) are urged in the same direction by their parents. Creativity was appreciated, but creative pursuit as “work” wasn’t an option in my parents’ perspective, and so it wasn’t in my own. But by the time I reached college, I was already dreaming of a life in books—what kind of life, I had no idea. So when I received my acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2000, I knew I’d been giving an incredible opportunity. It was at Iowa that I would finally give myself the permission to think, believe, know, that I was a writer.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

I’d probably be living outside the city. I’m a woodsy girl at heart. I grew up on the thickly forested North Shore of Long Island, also the setting for Cutting Teeth. I’d love to work in gardening, maybe landscape design. I inherited my green thumb from my father, whose family were farmers on the Amalfi Coast in Southern Italy. I feel such peace in my garden in Brooklyn, but then a helicopter flies overhead and I am returned to the real world.

I live in NYC because I love the people—especially the writers and the rich literary community—but I miss the sound of the wind swishing through the trees and the symphony of insect sounds at night. I’d love to work in a place surrounded by that kind of “noise.”

Are there any writers featured in this giveaway with whom you have a strong friendship? How did you meet that person? How do you support each other’s work?

Yes, I’m lucky to know almost all of these writers as friends, whether in real life or online. Some, like Scott Cheshire, Courtney Mauk, Ted Thompson, Emma Straub, Caeli Wolfson Widger and Marie-Helene Bertino are, or were, instructors at the workshop I founded—The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. Cristina Henriquez and Kevin Clouther were my classmates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Others are friends I know through the NYC literary world, like Porochista Khakpour, Brian Gresko, and Mira Jacob. Megan Abbott and Robin Black are writers I’ve considered long distance mentors—their work and literary citizenship has been an inspiration for years.

We support each other’s work in real life and online, and this is becoming, more and more, the heart of the literary world, as this wonderful giveaway proves. Writers need other writers—for inspiration and support as we are making the work, for courage as we are sending it out into the world, and then, again, as our work goes out to readers. One of the best and most authentic ways to connect with new readers is through other writers.

In the next six months, I’m reading at events with most of these writers and I can’t wait!

More About Julia Fierro

Julia Fierro is the founder of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a creative home to more than 2500 writers since 2002. Her novel, Cutting Teeth, was included in Library Journal‘s “Spring 2014 Best Debuts” and on “Most Anticipated Books of 2014” lists by HuffPost Books, The Millions, Flavorwire, Brooklyn Magazine and Marie Claire. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, she’s written for Guernica, Glamour, and other publications, and has been profiled in The L Magazine, The Observer, and The Economist. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children. Visit Julia’s website, find her on Twitter, and check out The Parenting Confessional Tumblr inspired by Cutting Teeth, and featured in RedBook, the UK Daily News, Yahoo! Shine, WhatToExpect.com, and more.

And please email your confessions to parentingconfessional@gmail.com!

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

The cover of Cutting Teeth shows famous pair of toys (check it out on Julia Fierro’s website). What was your childhood “lovey?” A stuffed teddy bear? A doll or blanket? Do you still have it?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Julia Fierro’s novel Cutting Teeth. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 7th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (May 6th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Nicole C. Kear’s memoir Now I See You. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Now I See You

“Just because a disability is involved, don’t go thinking somebody’s human spirit is about to triumph all over the place. This memoir has so much more. Now I See You is dark and surprising, wicked and hilarious. Like blindness itself.” – Ryan Knighton, author of Cockeyed

“Even if you’ve never gone to circus school, or driven night-blind through the streets of LA, even if you’ve never wept over knowing that someday you won’t be able to see your baby’s face, you will love every second spent inside Nicole C. Kear’s mind. Now I See You will make you laugh until you cry, bring down your tears until the page swims, and
require you to plough through the laughter and tears to find out what happens next, all because you’ll want to be as courageous, irreverent and in love with life as she is.” – Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, author of Bittersweet and The Effects of Light

“Nicole C. Kear is no ordinary blind lady.” – Nicole C. Kear’s 9-year-old son

A Short Q & A With Nicole C. Kear

What is the title of your book? Why?

The title of my book is Now I See You. My sister-in-law thought of the title over Christmas two years ago, when I begged for help. Like endings, I’ve never been great with titles and my working title was terrible, just a colossally bad match for my book. Now you really want to know what it is, don’t you? Blindsided. Sounds like an action/adventure story starring Bruce Willis, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, it’s the best of the list I’d complied, which mostly featured very pretentious choices, including about fifty permutations of the words in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, such as Not Go Gentle and That Good Night and probably even Do Not Go. Thank God for sisters-in-law.

What were the seeds of this book?

I took a seminar in college, about a year after I was diagnosed with the eye disease which my book addresses; the class was called Women’s 20th Century Spiritual Autobiography. It was taught by a rabbi, a nun and a minister and we read the memoirs of everyone from Julian of Norwich to Madeline L’Engle. At the end of the seminar, we all wrote our own autobiographies; mine was called “Star Light Star Bright” and it described my long and arduous process of coping with the prospect of blindness . . . for a whole 12 months. Twelve years later, I decided to revisit the topic, except in a way that wouldn’t make people hurl.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

I have a particular fondness for the epilogue of my book. Endings are usually really hard for me to write, a fact which is not surprising when I consider that they are hard for me, conversationally, which is to say, I really can’t shut up. I’m the person who says “Bye!” on the phone and then finds five other pressing things to add before actually hanging up. When you do that in a piece of writing, it just sucks. Because this is a memoir, and the story is my actual life, it was especially hard to know where it would end. And then, one day, I was rocking my infant daughter to sleep and I had one of those explosive “Aha!” moments where I realized: this is the ending. I wrote the epilogue in under an hour and hardly changed a word.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

I’d probably be a children’s librarian. I love kids. I love books. And I really, really love kids’ books, starting with Margaret Wise Brown all the way through John Green. I can’t stop myself from acting as a literary matchmaker for my kids, pulling books off the shelves at the Strand and bringing them over with a “Look at this – it’s PERFECT!” – and occasionally, I’m even right (I knew my third grader would like those Chet Gecko books!). Some of my favorite, most enduring memories have been reading to my kids – In The Night Kitchen and Charlotte’s Web and, right now, A Wrinkle in Time.

More About Nicole C. Kear

Nicole is the author of the forthcoming memoir Now I See You,  to be published by St. Martin’s Press in June. She contributes essays and articles to Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Psychology Today, Parents, American Baby, Babble and Salon, and she chronicles her continuing mid-adventures in Mommydom on her blog, A Mom Amok. A native of New York, she received a BA from Yale, a MA from Columbia, and a red nose from the San Francisco School of Circus Arts. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, three children and two feisty goldfish. You can find her on her website, Facebook and Twitter, and you can watch her book trailer here.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

Soon after her diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, Nicole C. Kear made a decision to keep her blindness a secret – read about the book here. Have you ever kept something a secret because it was easier than facing it head on?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Nicole C. Kear’s memoir Now I See You. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 6th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (May 5th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Robin Black’s novel Life Drawing. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Life Drawing

“[Robin Black] writes with exquisite precision, dark humor, and compassion about the tenderness as well as the savagery and terror of family and marriage. Her debut novel, Life Drawing, will be published this summer, and it’s a stunner – at its center is Gus, a painter who becomes complicit in a variegated affair that involves her husband and the “new couple” next door, a mother and her twenty-something daughter. For such a slender book, it does so much – it’s a meditation on female creativity, a love story and a ghost story, and a Greek tragedy staged in the contemporary American countryside.

“In her deliciously controlled prose, Black shows us how even our best intentions can genie out of our grasp, preparing the table for what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the banquet of consequence.” – Karen Russell

A Short Q & A With Robin Black

What is the title of your book? Why?

The title is Life Drawing. My narrator Gus is most comfortable painting landscapes and interiors, and she has never felt gifted at painting people, never felt that she has what it takes to animate human figures. But during the course of the book, she takes on a project that challenges that limitation. The term Life Drawing also resonates with a question that haunts the book, which is: How do our loved ones who have died fit into our lives once they’re gone? That’s very much what Gus is trying to understand. And of course, it’s also what she’s doing in telling the story, in bringing it all to “life” again.

Was there a particular moment that this book became its own beast, outside of you?

Life Drawing really took off for me when I made my narrator Augusta – or Gus – childless. It just made her so different from me since I’ve been a mother since I was twenty-five. It gave me permission to explore the depths of a woman living a kind of life I have never lived. And also, I know so many people who stayed married “for the kids,” I was really interested in looking at why- and how –  a couple might stay together, despite a real breach of trust, when it’s really just about them. Like many writers, I’m interested in investigating a lot of different permutations of love and of attachment, and it was really that absence of kids, that area of the unknown for me, that unlocked this book.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

My narrator Gus is a painter, and in trying to describe the difference between understanding her life as it unfolded, and then looking back on it after some time has passed, she states:  “As one of my teachers used to say, you cannot see a landscape you are in.”

I like that idea of the present as a landscape that you’re too involved in to see clearly, and I do think of time as a kind of distance that gives us all a clearer perspective. It makes sense to me too that a painter would make that connection between experience and something visual.

I’m not sure I would exactly say I’m proud of that concept, but it definitely helped me understand a large piece of what Life Drawing is really about.

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

I have an informal but lifelong background in painting, so I felt like that was helpful in understanding some of Gus’s perspective – though I should say, if I had made her a more successful artist, truly part of the art world, as opposed to an art teacher with some local success, I would have been out of my depths. I know very little about the contemporary art scene, which is part of why I steered clear of it in the novel.

The other thing that I really drew on is my absolute passionate love of the countryside. I should have known that my first novel would be a pastoral one – as a lot of my short stories are. There’s really nothing I enjoy writing about more than a house in the country, than people living in that house, than the seasons turning, the trees casting shadows. It all feels so much more compelling to my imagination than any other setting. Barns. Ponds. Snowy hills. I love it all.

When did you first know you were a writer?

I wrote when I was in college, but then took about seventeen years off to start a family and raise my three kids. I began writing seriously again when I was 39 but didn’t think of myself as a “writer” until I went to grad school at 41. And even then. . . Hmmm. To be honest, it was probably long after I’d started publishing stories that I could say, “I’m a writer,” without feeling like it was more wishful thinking than true. It seemed like a heavy identity to take on. But now, when I think of other people, I don’t feel that way at all. My feeling is that if you write, you’re a writer – and publication isn’t the determining thing. But when it came to giving myself that “title,” it took me a long, long time.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

When I was young, I wanted to be an actress and singer, but was too scared to try, and in many ways I now feel very distant from those dreams. At this point, if I weren’t writing books, I would be an interior designer. Or a house flipper. I love design and I love houses – to an obsessional degree. I think that comes through in just about everything I write. I’ve actually been asked in interviews why there’s so much about houses in all my work.

Life Drawing itself started with just an image of two houses in the country, of a man walking between them in the snow. That was the first thought I had about the book, and it’s still in the very first sentence.

More About Robin Black

Robin Black’s forthcoming debut novel Life Drawing has been called “(possibly) the nearest thing to a perfect novel that I have read,” by The Bookseller (UK) and “a riveting story about the corrosive effects of betrayal,” by Alice Sebold. Black’s 2010 story collection If I loved you, I would tell you this was a Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize and an O. Magazine Summer Reading Pick. Robin blogs about writing and being a writer at beyondthemargins.com. She lives in Philadelphia with her family and is at work on her next book. You can find her on her website, Twitter, and Facebook.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

In a Q & A on her website, Robin Black says, “in a very long term relationship, it can be difficult to remember that you are separate people” – read the Q & A here. Have you ever felt your identity blur with someone else’s – be they family, a lover, a friend, etc?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Robin Black’s novel Life Drawing. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 5th, 2014. Read the complete rules.