Jump to navigation Skip to content
Having friends and family over for the holidays? Check out this trailer for the second issue of Kinfolk Magazine then visit www.kinfolkmag.com to learn more about the quarterly magazine of essays, interviews, art, and photography that caters to the growing community of artists with a shared interest in small gatherings.
In the latest installment of his Failed Writer series, Yuvi Zalkow talks about his love affair with failure and how it serves him as a writer. "If you haven't already, give it a try," he says. "Be a hell of a failure. See what you learn from it."
Beginning next fall the childhood home of author and humorist James Thurber will open its doors annually to one writer for a monthlong retreat.
The John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence of Thurber House, located in Columbus, Ohio, will receive a stipend of four thousand dollars and a private, two-room apartment in which to develop a work-in-progress.
The inaugural residency will be offered to a nonfiction writer, in honor of the prize's namesake, the late author John E. Nance, whose work in the genre includes books on the Tasaday people of the Philippines, where he was an Associated Press bureau chief, and the biography of a master potter. In subsequent years, the award will be given in other genres.
Eligible writers for the 2012 award must have published one book of nonfiction (including creative nonfiction) within the past three years or have a book under contract. The most recent book or manuscript, as well as a brief application, must be submitted to Thurber House by March 15. Complete guidelines are available on the Thurber House website.
In this short film by Alessandro Novelli, each letter of the alphabet is illustrated based on the first letter of a font name.
She may be done giving public talks about Eat, Pray, Love, but this clip from 2009 is worth another look. In it Gilbert offers a refreshing way to think about creativity. "Somehow we've completely internalized and accepted, collectively, this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will ultimately lead to anguish," she says. "Are you guys all cool with that idea?"
To anyone who has read Nick Flynn's 2004 memoir, the new movie starring Robert DeNiro, Paul Dano, and Julianne Moore will be known as Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. To Hollywood, it is known as Being Flynn, forthcoming next spring from director Paul Weitz.
In 1964 author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set off on an LSD-fueled bus trip to the New York World's Fair. Along the way they intended to make a documentary, but the film was never finished. Directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given access to the raw footage to create Magic Trip, which is now available on iTunes and Netflix.
In this playful video a reader transforms his alphabetically ordered bookshelves into a literary display of the color spectrum.
In Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, published last month by Harper Perennial, Blake Butler uses scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King to explore the tension between sleeping and conscious life. This bizarre trailer, directed by Drew Mobley, evokes Butler's own 129-hour bout of insomnia described in the book.
Having chronicled her husband’s sudden death in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion returns to the subject of loss in a new memoir, Blue Nights, about the subsequent passing of her daughter.
