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In this video, writers and book lovers—including Rumaan Alam, Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Woodson, Neil Gaiman, Mira Jacob, Benjamin Percy, and Peter Straub—help celebrate Independent Bookstore Day and the opening of Books Are Magic. The new bookstore is run by novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub in Brooklyn.
Submissions are currently open for BOMB Magazine’s 2017 fiction contest. A prize of $1,000 and publication in BOMB’s literary supplement, First Proof, is given in alternating years for a group of poems and a short story. This year’s contest will be given for a short story. Novelist and essayist Paul La Farge will judge.
Using the online submission system, submit a story of up to 5,000 words with a $20 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to BOMB (for U.S. entrants), by May 31.
Previous winners of the fiction contest, whose winning work you can read on the BOMB website, include Jen George, Michael Baptist, Karen Walker Thompson, and Sean Madigan Hoen.
Established in 1981 as a quarterly magazine of conversations and interviews between interdisciplinary artists, BOMB is now a “multi-media publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature." E-mail firstproof@bombsite.com or visit the BOMB website for more information.
Photo: Paul La Farge. Credit: Carol Shadford
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What kind of secret should be taken to the grave? How might a secret act as proof of intimacy? For the debut of Sophie Calle’s most recent art installation, the artist spent two afternoons receiving and transcribing visitors’ secrets, and then depositing them into a monumental obelisk installed in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery. In Calle’s instructive text about the project, she writes of one previously divulged secret, “At the very moment he was depriving me of his love, this man offered me, through his confession, the ultimate proof of our intimacy.” Write a short story in which you imagine the ending to that story. What is the secret that this man confesses to Calle as they are breaking up? Why does he share it with her in their last moments together?
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Fiction writer T. Geronimo Johnson has won the Simpson Family Literary Project’s inaugural literary prize. He will receive $50,000 and a brief residency at the Lafayette Library and the University of California in Berkeley. He will also make a number of public appearances and give a public reading in the San Francisco Bay Area. The annual award is given to a midcareer fiction writer to encourage and support forthcoming work.
Johnson, whose 2015 novel, Welcome to Braggsville, was longlisted for the National Book Award, plans to use the $50,000 prize to support his forthcoming novel,which the author says “explores the convergence of Afro-futurism; global AI; the economic imperatives that amplify cultural differences; corporate religion (in all manifestations); and tech inequity. The question behind this novel is the same question that animates my previous work: How do we learn to care about people who are not like us? I’m thrilled by the opportunity to complete this journey without interruption.”The Simpson Family Literary Prize is cosponsored by the Lafayette Library & Learning Center Foundation in Lafayette, California, and the English Department at the University of California in Berkeley. An anonymous jury selects the winner; there is no application process.
Joe Di Prisco, the Literary Project’s founder and prize chair, established the foundation in 2012 with a mission to foster and build creative writing communities in the Bay Area through collaboration between libraries and university-affiliated creative writing programs. In addition to the literary prize, the Simpson Family Literary Project sponsors community outreach programs, including creative writing classes for high school students and incarcerated youth in diverse communities in California, as well as an annual writer-in-residence program at the Lafayette Library & Learning Center.
Di Prisco says he is excited about the continued growth of the project and selecting Johnson as the winner of its inaugural prize: “The Simpson Family Literary Project is thrilled to share Johnson and his brilliant work with students, readers, writers, teachers, professors, and librarians across generations.”
(Photo: T. Geronimo Johnson; Credit: Sandra Dyas)
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The Circle (Knopf/McSweeney’s Books, 2013), Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel about a young woman who rises through the ranks of a powerful tech and social media company, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by James Ponsoldt, the film stars John Boyega, Tom Hanks, and Emma Watson.
