Checked Your Amazon Sales Ranking Lately?
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Married authors John Yunker and Midge Raymond present a cautionary tale titled "Love in the Time of Amazon.com."
Genre: Creative Nonfiction
Spalding Gray
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The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin recently acquired the archives of Spalding Gray, the author, actor, and monologuist who died in 2004. Among the materials in the collection are notebooks and diaries Gray used while writing his performance pieces, including “Swimming to Cambodia,” the first few minutes of which is seen here.
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Brian Dettmer's Altered Books
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Brian Dettmer, whose art has appeared in past issues of Poets & Writers Magazine, explains his process of altering used books, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and medical guides, to create intricate three-dimensional works that reveal new interpretations of the original books.
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SoulPancake
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Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office, promotes his new book, Soulpancake (Hyperion). Written with Devon Gundry, Golriz Lucina, and Shabnam Mogharabi, the book aims to inspire readers to examine life's big questions and includes art and commentary by authors and artists.
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Facing the Facts: A Profile of Heather Sellers
Staring down a disorder that prevents her from recognizing faces offers ample material for a memoir, but Heather Sellers tackles much more in You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know.
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Literary MagNet
Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Pleiades, Nashville Review, Sycamore Review, One Story, the Oxford American, the Awakenings Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Bound Off.
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Jim Carroll’s Last Book
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Poet and musician Jim Carroll was putting the finishing touches on a novel when he passed away on September 11, 2009. Next week Viking will publish that novel, The Petting Zoo. This is the music video of The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died,” which appeared on the soundtrack of the 1995 film version of his autobiography, The Basketball Diaries, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
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The Final Stage of Mike Heppner's Publishing Journey
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In the September/October 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we published the essay "Taking It to the Streets: My Year in Guerrilla Publishing" in which Mike Heppner writes about his trajectory from commercially published author to small press author to self-published, D-I-Y author. In this video, Heppner describes the final stage of his Man Talking Project: hand-delivering his manuscript to one of his readers.
Nine Emerging Writers Snag Fifty Grand Award
The winners of this year’s fifty-thousand-dollar Whiting Writers' Awards, given to promising writers nominated by established authors and literary professionals across the United States, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. This marks the twenty-fifth year of the prizes, which have bolstered the early careers of luminaries including Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, and C. D. Wright.
The winning poets are Matt Donovan, author of the collection Vellum (Mariner Books, 2007); Jane Springer, author of Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007); and L. B. Thompson, whose chapbook is Tendered Notes (Center for Book Arts, 2003). The fiction winners are Michael Dahlie, author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living (Norton, 2008); Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of the short story collection Sightseeing (Grove Press, 2004); and Lydia Peelle, author of the story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (Harper Perennial, 2009). The nonfiction winners are Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last February; Amy Leach, whose essay collection about animals, plants, and stars is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2012; and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (The Dial Press, 2009).
Six of the winners hold MFAs—from New York University, University of Iowa’s nonfiction program, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Washington University—and two hold doctorate degrees. Among the magazines that have published multiple winners’ works are Granta, the New Yorker, and Orion. Full biographies on the winners are posted on the Web site of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, sponsor of the awards.
In the video below, creative nonfiction winner Sayrafiezadeh reveals a dirty little literary secret.
Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia
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New Yorker editor David Remnick talks with Ian Frazier, whose new book, Travels in Siberia, was published earlier this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The conversation took place at the New Yorker Festival on October 3.
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