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“You read so many versions of girlhood or what it’s supposed to look like and it can feel very alienating and untrue.” At the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, author Emma Cline discusses her writing process and the inspiration for her debut novel, The Girls (Random House, 2016), with Ellen Sussman.
Viet Thanh Nguyen makes a case against the writing workshop; tracing the origins of well-known quotes; Mohammed Hasan Alwan wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction; and other news.
Can you write a story with a hook, chapters with twists and turns, pages that end on cliffhangers? In the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Jonathan Vatner’s article “Serial Fiction for the Digital Age” reports on Radish, a serial-reading mobile app in which writers release fiction installments chapter by chapter for readers to download. Over the course of several weeks, try your hand at writing a long-form story in one-thousand-word segments made for serial reading. How do you manipulate the tone, imagery, and structure of each segment’s ending so that it both concludes the standalone chapter and entices the reader to continue wondering what comes next?
“War is coming.” Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods (William Morrow, 2001) has been adapted into a television series starring Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday and Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon. Gaiman serves as an executive producer for the series developed by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green.
Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner (Hogarth, 2012), translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, has been adapted into a feature film directed by Oren Moverman and starring Steve Coogan, Richard Gere, Rebecca Hall, and Laura Linney. The story unfolds over the course of a dinner as two couples struggle over moral implications surrounding a crime committed by their teenage sons.
Robert M. Pirsig has died; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt makes another round of layoffs; Monica Youn on poetry, women, and property; and other news.
Theater company commissions thirty-eight new Shakespeare-inspired plays; what the Proto-Indo-European language may have sounded like; the growth of explicitly political poetry; and other news.
The shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize was announced yesterday. The annual award is given for a book of fiction translated into English and published during the previous year. The £50,000 prize (approximately $63,900) is split between the writer and translator of the winning book, which will be announced on June 14 in London.
Each of the shortlisted authors and translators will receive £1,000 (approximately $1,280). The finalists are:
Compass (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Mathias Enard (France) and translated by Charlotte Mandell (US)
A Horse Walks Into a Bar (Jonathan Cape) by David Grossman (Israel) and translated by Jessica Cohen (US)
The Unseen (Maclehose) by Roy Jacobsen (Norway) and translated by Don Bartlett (UK) and Don Shaw (UK)
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Pushkin Press) by Dorthe Nors (Denmark) and translated by Misha Hoekstra (US)
Judas (Chatto & Windus) by Amos Oz (Israel) and translated by Nicholas de Lange (UK)
Fever Dream (Oneworld) by Samanta Schweblin (Argentina) and translated by Megan McDowell (US),
“Our shortlist spans the epic and the everyday,” says Nick Barley, the chair of the judging panel. “From fevered dreams to sleepless nights, from remote islands to overwhelming cities, these wonderful novels shine a light on compelling individuals struggling to make sense of their place in a complex world.” The four other judges for the 2017 prize are Daniel Hahn, Elif Shafak, Chika Unigwe, and Helen Mort. The six finalists were selected from a longlist of thirteen, which in turn was selected from 126 submissions.
The prize, which was formerly given biennially for a fiction writer’s body of work, combined last year with the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize to award a single book of translated fiction. Han Kang and Deborah Smith won the 2016 prize for Smith’s translation from the Korean of Han’s novel The Vegetarian.
Man Booker International Prize shortlist announced; Bill O’Reilly’s 1998 novel about a fired TV newsman; the subjectivity of literary taste; and other news.
Henry Holt to continue publishing Bill O’Reilly; the process of adding words to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai to publish picture book; and other news.
