The Tell-Tale Heart
Caption:
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" comes alive in this spooky adaptation. Voiced by Tony Tsendeas. Directed by Darren Walker and Travis Mays.
Genre:
Genre: Fiction
Halloween Story
Halloween evokes the power of tradition, superstition, and society. Our children dress up as heroes, goblins, and villains and scamper along our neighbors’ sidewalks, lawns, and driveways beseeching candy. Write six hundred words about a confrontation between an adult homeowner and a group of children. Allow the colors, tones, noises, smells, and feel of Halloween to inform—if not define—your writing. Be funny. Be scary. Be creative.
Lit Camp
The spring 2023 Lit Camp was held from June 4 to June 9 at the Bell Valley Retreat Center in Mendocino County, California. The conference included craft talks and writing time for fiction and creative nonfiction writers. The faculty included fiction and nonfiction writers Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Susan Straight, and Daniel Torday. The cost of the conference, including lodging and meals, ranged from $1,095 to $2,095, depending on lodging choice. Registration was limited to 25 participants. Partial scholarships were available.
Type:
CONFERENCE
Ignore Event Date Field?:
yes
Event Date:
June 16, 2025
Rolling Admissions:
ignore
Application Deadline:
June 16, 2025
Financial Aid?:
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline:
June 16, 2025
Free Admission:
no
Contact Information:
Lit Camp, c/o 379 Laidley Street, San Francisco, CA 94131. Janis Cooke Newman, Founder.
Janis Cooke Newman
Founder
Contact City:
Mendocino County
Contact State:
CA
Country:
US
Genre:
Bennett Sims Wins Bard Fiction Prize
Author Bennett Sims has been selected to receive the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize. Given annually to an emerging writer for a book of innovative fiction, the prize includes a $30,000 cash award and an appointment as writer-in-residence at Bard College for one semester.
Sims receives the award for his debut novel, A Questionable Shape, published by Two Dollar Radio this past May. He will complete his residency during the spring 2014 semester, during which time he will continue his writing, meet with students, and give a public reading.
Photo credit: Carmen Machado
“The judges delight in welcoming to the literary community of Bard a writer whose first novel represents a powerful (and very readable) fusion of genres—a story about the vagaries of human perception which is also a wild romp of zombies biting through a curiously lyrical apocalypse,” the Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote in a press release. “The author was one of the last students of David Foster Wallace, who was the first reader of the first version of this haunting novel of love and estrangement.”
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Sims has studied at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story.
Established in 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize is given to writers under the age of forty. Last year’s prize was awarded to Brian Conn for his experimental novel, The Fixed Stars (Fiction Collective 2, 2010).
To apply for the 2015 prize, fiction writers may submit a curriculum vitae, a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard, and three copies of a published book of fiction by July 15, 2014. Visit the website for more information.
Why Writing Fiction Is So Difficult
Caption:
Author Jonathan Safran Foer discusses the difficulties of writing, his faith in the creative process, and what makes a book "good."
Genre:
Failing Forward
“Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction,” storyteller John Cheever once stated in an interview. Place your protagonist in an unexpected situation—trapped in a chimney, confronted by a ghost, or suddenly penniless. Unforeseen conflict reveals hidden character flaws and virtues. Don’t self-edit. Though it may not make the final draft, experimental writing deeply informs both style and character. Writing is the act of failing forward every time you sit down.
Ten Emerging Writers Receive Whiting Awards
The Whiting Writers’ Awards, given annually by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to ten emerging writers who show “exceptional talent and promise in early career,” were announced on Monday. Each writer will receive the $50,000.
The 2013 winners are Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, a fiction and nonfiction writer whose novella, The Man Who Danced with Dolls, was published in 2012 by Madras Press; Amanda Coplin, a fiction writer whose first novel, The Orchardist, was published by HarperCollins in 2012; Jennifer duBois, a fiction writer whose debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was published by Dial Press in 2012, and whose newest novel, Cartwheel, was published in September by Random House; Virginia Grise, the author of several plays including Making Myth; Ishion Hutchinson, a poet whose debut collection, Far District, was published by Peepal Tree Press Limited in 2010; Morgan Meis, a nonfiction writer whose collection of essays, Ruins, was published by Fallen Bros Press in 2012; C. E. Morgan, a fiction writer whose first novel, All the Living, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009; Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet whose first collection, The Ground, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2012; Clifford Thompson, a fiction and nonfiction writer whose essay collection, Love for Sale, was published this year by Autumn House Press; and Stephanie Powell Watts, a fiction writer whose debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need, was published in 2012 by BkMk Press.
The Whiting Awards honor works in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, and are intended to identify writers “who have yet to make their mark on the literary culture.'’
Since 1985, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Writing Foundation has given over $6 million to 290 writers. Visit the website to learn more about this year's winners.
How to Write a Short Story
Caption:
“The nobility at the center of our lives is that we face that sadness.” Award-winning fiction writer John Dufresne offers tips on writing an intriguing story and how to be surprised by your characters.
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Tags:
National Book Award Finalists Announced
The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for its annual National Book Awards this week. The selection of finalists follows last month’s longlist announcement, the first time in the foundation’s sixty-four-year history that such a list has been published.
The finalists in fiction are Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner); Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Knopf); James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead); Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (Penguin); and George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House).
The finalists in poetry are Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf); Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin); Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press); and Mary Szybist, Incarnadine (Graywolf Press).
The finalists in nonfiction are Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Knopf); Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (Norton); and Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (Knopf).
Also new from the foundation is The Contenders: Excerpts from the 2013 National Book Award Finalists, a free National Book Award eBook series available for download from the foundation’s website in a variety of formats.
Visit the website to read more about the finalists, and to see the selections in the category of young people’s literature. Selections in each of the four categories were made by a panel of judges comprised of five writers and literary professionals.
The winners will be announced at the sixty-fourth annual National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony in New York City on November 20, which will be streamed live on the Foundation’s website. Winners will receive $10,000; all finalists will receive $1,000.
Eleanor Catton Wins 2013 Man Booker Prize
Caption:
New Zealand author Eleanor Catton won the prestigious Man Booker Prize this week for her novel The Luminaries, making the twenty-eight-year-old writer the youngest ever to win the prize.
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Pages
