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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.
This fall the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival is sponsoring a contest for stories and essays centered on the most populous borough of New York City. The organization is looking for "compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages, who can render Brooklyn's rich soul and intangible qualities" using their actual experiences in Kings County as inspiration.
One prose writer, selected by a panel of Brooklyn authors, will receive a prize of four hundred dollars, and the winning piece will be published on the festival website. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, near the borough's downtown area.
Story and essay entries, which should range from four to ten pages (up to twenty-five hundred words), should be submitted via e-mail by November 25. There is no entry fee. For more information, visit the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival blog.
The video below is a trailer for some of last year's festival offerings, featuring shots of Brooklyn past and present.
Learn how to decipher the sometimes arcane methods that publishers use to label first editions (the language and lines of numbers on copyright pages) in this incredibly helpful video from AbeBooks.
Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.
The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.
Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.
"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."
In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).
Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.
