October 20
Pick a short story by another writer and use its ending as the beginning for a new story of your own.
Genre: Fiction
Fourth Time's a Charm for Julian Barnes
The Man Booker Prize was awarded last night to British author Julian Barnes, who had been a contender for the honor on three previous occasions. The author, who once called the prize "posh bingo," won this year for his best-selling novel The Sense of an Ending, published earlier this month in the United States by Knopf (the original U.K. publisher is Jonathan Cape).
Barnes, who was a finalist in 1984, 1998, and 2005, says he stands by his earlier assessment of the award as a sort of game whose outcome is dependent on the fluctuating tastes of the judging panel. For shortlisted authors full of "hope and lust and greed and expectation" he suggests treating the award as a lottery—that is, until you win and "realize that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom."
This year's chair of judges, Stella Rimington, whose Booker jury faced criticism earlier this year about its prioritization of accessible books over those of high literary merit, called Barnes's book "very readable, if I may use the word." She added that it has "the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading."
Barnes received fifty thousand pounds (approximately seventy-nine thousand dollars). The shortlisted authors each took home twenty-five hundred pounds (approximately thirty-nine thousand dollars).
In the video below, Barnes reacts to his win.
Naomi Wolf Arrested, Denis Leary Hosts Ploughshares Event, and More
Author Naomi Wolf was arrested last night at an Occupy Wall Street protest; Denis Leary's hosting Ploughshares upcoming fortieth anniversary gala; Hunter S. Thompson's correspondence; and other news.
Ruth Gruber
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"My father, he'd say, 'You have to have a career.' I said, 'I want to be a writer.'" Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Ruth Gruber became the youngest PhD in the world before going on to become an international foreign correspondent and photojournalist at age twenty-four. "Ahead of Time," a documentary by Bob Richman, tells the story of how Gruber defied tradition in an extraordinary career that has spanned more than seven decades.
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Story Prize Names 2011 Judges
The eighth annual Story Prize, the twenty-thousand-dollar award given for a short story collection, will be judged by an award-winning fiction writer, a translator and international literature scholar, and a memoirist who curates a celebrated reading series.
Sherman Alexie, whose most recent story collection, War Dances (Grove Press, 2009), won the PEN/Faulkner Award, will be joined by Indiana University professor Breon Mitchell, who has translated the fiction of Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Franz Kafka, among others. Completing the jury is Louise Steinman, curator of the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD reading and conversation series and author of the memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. The three will select the winner from a trio of finalists chosen by prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsay.
The Story Prize is still accepting entries of story collections published during the second half of 2011. Submissions must be made by November 15.
Finalists will be announced in January, and the winner announcement will follow an evening of readings and interviews with the finalists in New York City on March 21.
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway
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The first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, published last month by Cambridge University Press, collects the correspondence of the Nobel Prize winner, including postcards, telegrams, and drafts of letters, written between 1907 and 1922 and never intended for publication.
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Catch-22
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Earlier this year Simon & Schuster released a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the satrical novel set during World War II that is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Heller began writing it in 1953, and the novel was first published in November 1961.
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October 13
Imagine a character whose job—such as a banker, thrift store cashier, babysitter, college president—typically implies certain traits about this person and a certain lifestyle. Write a story in which this character's life outside of his or her work is drastically different from what is typical. Explore in your writing why this is so, using it to inform the plot and to create tension in the story.
Two Debut Novels Among National Book Award Contenders
The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced the National Book Award finalists today from Portland on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The finalists in poetry are:
Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa for The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips for Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 (Norton)
Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press)
The finalists in fiction are:
Andrew Krivak for his debut novel, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, who was honored by the NBF last year as a 5 Under 35 author, for her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
Julie Otsuka for her novel The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Jesmyn Ward for her novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury)
This year saw the first graphic book finalist, in the nonfiction category: Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books). The nonfiction shortlist also includes biographies of Malcolm X and Karl and Jenny Marx, as well as Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (Norton), a look at Lucretius's philosophical poem, "On the Nature of Things."
The National Book Award winners will be announced on November 16 in New York City.
In the video below, Finney reads and discusses the story behind a poem from Head Off & Split.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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"How does reading about love affect how we fall in love today?" Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote his third novel, The Marriage Plot, around that very question, discusses his new book, the influence of Nabokov, and the pressure of following up his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.
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