We Are Pirates
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Book critic Ron Charles provides a humorous plot summary of Daniel Handler's new novel, We Are Pirates (Bloomsbury, 2015). You can read Charles's full review of the book in the Washington Post.
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Genre: Fiction
The Buried Giant
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In this forthcoming novel from the Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, a couple set off on a journey to find a son they have not seen in years. The Buried Giant (Knopf, 2015) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Personal Assistant
Is one of your characters overwhelmed by all the tasks she needs to do on a daily basis? Have her hire a family member as a personal assistant. Maybe her retired father or grandmother needs a part-time job. Write about the kinds of things she would have the assistant do for her, and all the wacky situations that result from this new relationship.
Holy Cow
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"I think ideas for independent films often make decent plots for novels because they're human." Actor David Duchovny speaks about how an idea for a screenplay turned into his debut novel, Holy Cow, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last week.
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Folio Prize Shortlist Announced
The shortlist for the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction was announced today. The eight finalists, selected from a list of eighty works, are 10:04 by Ben Lerner (Granta), All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Faber), Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Granta), Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Granta), Family Life by Akhil Sharma (Faber), How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton), Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Viking), and Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber).
Now in its second year, the annual Folio Prize is awarded for a book of fiction published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. The prize is open to writers from any country, and aims to “celebrate the best fiction of our time, regardless of form or genre, and to bring it to the attention of as many readers as possible.” The winner receives an award of £40,000 ($60,000). George Saunders won the inaugural 2014 Folio Prize for his short story collection Tenth of December (Random House).
Acclaimed writers William Fiennes, Rachel Cooke, Mohsin Hamid, A. M. Homes, and Deborah Levy compose this year's judging panel. The judges are members of the Folio Prize Academy—an international group of 235 writers and critics. Fiennes, the judging panel Chair, stated in a press release that the shortlisted works “manage to be both epic and intimate—in fact, they show those dimensions to be two sides of the same coin. They’ve surprised, moved, challenged and enchanted us. They’ve made us laugh. They’ve grown and deepened when we read them again.”
The winner will be announced on March 23 in London in a ceremony following the Folio Prize Fiction Festival. The festival, which will return for its second year at the British Library, will feature panel discussions from authors and critics from the Folio Prize Academy, as well as readings from the shortlisted authors.
The prize is sponsored by the London-based Folio Society, which publishes high-quality illustrated editions of classic and contemporary works. Visit the Folio Prize website to learn more.
Photos above, left to right: Ben Lerner (credit FSG), Colm Tóibín (credit Scribner) and Ali Smith (credit David Levenson, Getty)
The Novella: Forgotten Stories
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"What fascinates me about recovering forgotten stories is how often they are the real tipping points for much bigger cultural, defining moments." Journalist Julianne Schultz moderates a discussion about the importance of the novella as a literary form at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Australia.
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Doris Lessing
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"You invent whole sections of something and then later some biographer wants to know which is true and what isn't, and you have to sit and think." In this short video produced in 2013, the late Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing shares anecdotes from her life as a writer. Currently, a search is on to appoint a new biographer for Lessing.
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New Sport
This week, have one of your characters become disillusioned with football (or another major sport) and inspired to invent a new sport. The possibilities are endless. Think of what the objective will be, whether or not it will be team-based, what sort of equipment or arena will be necessary, and so on. Imagine a world in which this new sport catches on and becomes more popular than any other sport in history.
Her
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In her new novel, published last month by Little, Brown, Harriet Lane examines a complicated friendship between two women from different worlds. In alternate chapters, the same events are told from the separate perspectives of the two main characters.
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Ned Beauman
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The London native and youngest writer on Granta's list of the best young British novelists in 2013, reads from his latest novel, Glow (Knopf, 2015). The Bookshop Band performs a song inspired by Beauman's book called "We Are the Foxes."
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