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With work on their minds this Labor Day weekend (when many of us are taking three days off), the fine folks at Open Road Media take a look at how several writers, including Andres Dubus and Don Winslow, paid the bills while they were struggling to make it in the literary world.
Christopher Fritton of the Western New York Book Arts Center demonstrates the process of creating part of a book for the artist Richard Tuttle.
This summer W. W. Norton announced plans to resurrect Liveright & Company, the storied imprint that introduced American readers to early works by luminaries such as Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.
In her second novel, Julie Otsuka returns to the chapter in Japanese American history that captured the attention of so many fans of her debut: the relocation camps of World War II.
In September Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish South African author Jacques Strauss's debut novel, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V., about eleven-year-old Jack Viljee, whose hometown of Johannesburg in 1989 is still ruled by apartheid.
Seth Fried, whose story collection The Great Frustration was published by Soft Skull Press in May, finds a simple way of getting good placement of his debut book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City.
In honor of the birthday (August 30, 1797) this week of Mary Shelley, author of the classic Frankenstein, a novel she based on a dream, write a horror story, using material from your most memorable nightmares, should you need it.
Now available in the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, Booktrack provides a soundtrack for e-books, including songs, ambient music, and sound effects, that is automatically paced to an individual's reading speed.
New York City's Center for Fiction, formerly the Mercantile Library, has announced the seven-strong shortlist for its Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The ten-thousand-dollar award will be given at the Center's annual benefit on December 6, where the organization will also honor Scribner editor in chief Nan Graham with the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.
The shortlisted debut novels are The Free World by David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (Norton), Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke (Knopf), The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins (Knopf), Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (Other Press), Shards by Ismet Prcic (Black Cat), and Touch by Alexi Zentner (Norton).
The award, formerly the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, has gone in previous years to Karl Marlantes, John Pipkin, Hannah Tinti, Junot Díaz, and Marisha Pessl.
In the video below, shortlisted author Sarah Braunstein discusses her debut, which was seven years in the making.
Your assignment is to go wild. Let the sacred and profane language spill from you without censor. Find the wildest part of your personality and give it full vent for five pages. Forget about obedience of language, of character, of form. Forget about what is proper. Write the feral sentences you've been afraid to say in public. Have no shame for a spell. Free yourself from the confines of a well-behaved syntax, of expected word choice. Here's my hell-bent, uninhibited narrator from Busy Monsters, Charlie Homar, after making a rather asinine decision involving a firearm: "My mission shat upon by the Miocene logic and cruel outcomes afflicting all those with pluck but no punctilio, with hearts that run on gasoline: okay, I overreacted, I admit it." Never rely on the available jargon. For five nonstop pages, surprise yourself with the ecstatic language you know is in you.
This week's fiction prompt comes from William Giraldi, author of the novel Busy Monsters, published by W. W. Norton in August.
