Jump to navigation Skip to content
Tell a story through the journal entries and/or correspondences of the central characters. Note how the switch between different perspectives and the reliability—or lack thereof—of the characters affect the way the plot is revealed to the reader. For inspiration, read Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story.
Author Rick Moody will serve as the judge for the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review’s inaugural Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction. The winner will receive $500 and publication in the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.
Eckleburg, the literary journal housed by the Johns Hopkins University M.A. Program in writing, launched the first annual competition, which is currently open for submissions, this past July. Writers, editors, publishers, and agents may submit short stories of up to 5,000 words, along with a $10 entry fee, by January 1, 2013. Second- and third-place winners will also receive publication in the journal.
Taking its name from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the online quarterly publishes original fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and translation from emerging and established writers. In addition to work by Rick Moody, the journal has also featured original writing by Stephen Dixon, Moira Egan, and David Wagoner. The journal looks for character-driven storytelling that is eclectic and experimental; it welcomes magical realism, surrealism, metarealism, and offbeat realism, and "humor that explores the gritty realities of the world and human experiences.
“It is Eckleburg‘s intention to represent writers, artists, musicians, and comedians as a contemporary and noninvasive collective, each work evidence of its own artistry, not as a reflection of an editor’s vision of what an issue 'should' be," the journal’s website states. “It is our intention to create an experience in which readers and viewers can think artistically, intellectually, socially, and independently. We welcome brave, honest voices.”
Rick Moody is the author of five novels, including Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award in 1992, as well as four short story collections and a memoir. He has received a PEN/Martha Albrand Award, an Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
For more information on the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review or the Gertrude Stein Award, visit the website.
The Penguin Press has released eight novels by Thomas Pynchon, including Gravity's Raindbow, Vineland, and Against the Day, as e-books. If that news doesn't excite you, perhaps this rockin' trailer will.
Authors Alison Bechdel, Terry Castle, and Joan Schenkar and editor Robert Weil talk about the influence of Patricia Highsmith, twenty-one of whose works are available in print and e-book from W.W. Norton.
To promote his third novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, published this month by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Jonathan Evison is hitting the road for a tour that begins August 25 at Sunriver Books & Music in Sunriver, Oregon, and wraps up on October 28 at the Texas Book Festival in Austin.
America's '80s icon is back with a novel in stories, When It Happens to You, published this month by It Books. In this video from the Daily Beast, Ringwald talks about writing, the perils of Twitter, and her work in Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink.
The Center for Fiction and the American Booksellers Association have announced the short list for the 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Of the seven finalists for the prize, the winner—to be announced in December—will receive $10,000.
The seven short-listed titles include: Absolution (Riverhead Books) by Patrick Flanery; Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco) by Ben Fountain; The Dog Stars (Knopf) by Peter Heller; Girlchild (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Tupelo Hassman; The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur Books) by Eowyn Ivey; Seating Arrangements (Knopf) by Maggie Shipstead; and Alif the Unseen (Grove/Atlantic) by G. Willow Wilson. Each of the finalists will receive $1,000.
Established in 2005 as the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize, the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize is given annually for a debut novel published in the previous year. Author and Center for Fiction board member Nancy Dunnan, who has supported the award since 2010, renamed it for her father, the journalist Ray W. Flaherty.
In order to help promote the seven short-listed titles, the New York City-based Center for Fiction announced a new partnership with the American Booksellers Association this past January. The ABA will select 450 United States bookstores to receive displays, posters, and other promotional materials for the seven books. Additionally, sixty-five independent booksellers from across the country were asked to serve as first-round readers for the 2012 prize.
“We believe that there are no better readers than the people who continue against all seeming odds to own and operate independent bookstores,” Center for Fiction executive director Noreen Tomassi said in a press release. Once the first round of readers recommended a long list, a panel of judges comprised of distinguished American writers then selected the seven finalists.
The winner will be announced at the Center for Fiction’s annual benefit and awards dinner on December 11 in New York City.
Past winners of the prize include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books) by Junot Díaz; Lamb (Other Press) by Bonnie Nadzam; Matterhorn (Grove/Atlantic) by Karl Marlantes; Woodsburner (Nan A. Talese) by John Pipkin; The Good Thief (The Dial Press) by Hannah Tinti; and Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking) by Marisha Pessl.
Compose a story by making a fairy tale or old folktale contemporary. Aim to retain the basic plot of the original tale, but have the characters' tensions and fears reflect twenty-first-century encounters and conflicts. For an added challenge, offer an alternate ending or tell the narrative from an unexpected perspective.
Author Tim O’Brien has been awarded the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran whose work often deals with war, and who is perhaps most well known for his short story collection The Things They Carried, will receive $10,000.
Established in 2006 and inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize is given internationally for literature that promotes peace, social justice, and global understanding. In addition to two annual prizes given for a work of fiction and a work of nonfiction published in the previous year, the Richard C. Holbrooke Award—named for the United States diplomat who played an instrumental role in negotiating the Dayton Accords—is given annually for a body of work.
"The Dayton Literary Peace Prize promotes the cause of peace by helping people understand the ugly realities of war on a deep, personal level, which is exactly what I strive to do in my work," O'Brien said. "Over what has been a long career, this award means more to me than any other—by far."
Originally from Austin, Minnesota, O’Brien served in the United States Army in Vietnam for a year, and later worked as a national affairs reporter for the Washington Post. His first book was the 1973 memoir about his experiences at war, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He received a National Book Award in 1979 for his novel about Vietnam, Going After Cacciato (Doubleday); his 1990 collection, The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; In the Lake of the Woods (Penguin, 1995) received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. His most recent novel is July, July, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. The sixty-five-year-old O’Brien lives in central Texas and teaches writing in the MFA program at Texas State University in San Marcos.
Previous Peace Prize winners include Geraldine Brooks, Barbara Kingsolver, Studs Terkel, and Elie Wiesel. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, on November 11.
In the following 2010 Art Works podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts and Public Radio Exchange, O’Brien discusses The Things They Carried on the twentieth anniversary of its release.
A comprehensive article about how we compiled the 2013 MFA Index of full- and low-residency programs, featured in the September/October 2012 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
