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Terese Svoboda's fifth novel, Bohemian Girl, forthcoming from Bison Books next month, is one of twelve new and noteworthy books featured in the latest installment of Page One. Watch the trailer then read an excerpt from the first chapter.
Simon & Schuster employees have a little fun reading from Nicholson Baker's new erotic novel, House of Holes, which was reviewed on the cover of last Sunday's New York Times Book Review by Sam Lipsyte, who called it a "hideously glorious filthfest."
A man and a woman in a room. This is Salina, Kansas. He wears cufflinks on his white shirt sleeves, a silk tie. She seems preoccupied. She holds a glass in her hand. Write their story in three hundred words. Use the word "salvation" and the word "light." Make one of the pair the central character and construct the story from his or her point of view.
This week's fiction prompt comes from novelist John Dufresne, author, most recently, of the book Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months (Norton, 2010).
Based on the 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly and directed by Lynne Ramsay, will open in theaters in France next month, in the U.K. in October, and in the U.S. in December.
In response to the "I Hate Reading" Facebook page (which is "liked" by nearly half a million people), Lindsay Thompson, an account manager at AbeBooks, created this brief appreciation of books. And if you find this inspiring, check out one of several (sadly less popular) "I Love Reading" pages that have popped up on Facebook.
The official pub date for Justin Torres’s We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is September 1, but already the debut novel is racking up superlatives typically reserved for more established authors. Michael Cunningham calls it “heartbreaking” and “beautiful.” Paul Harding calls it “an indelible and essential work of art.” And Benjamin Percy, in the current issue of Esquire, calls it “a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape.”
The National Book Awards, a literary institution for more than sixty years, broke through their traditional submission guidelines recently, accepting for the first time an exclusively electronic book as a nominee. According to National Book Foundation (NBF) executive director Harold Augenbraum, although the rules stipulate that eligible books must be printable on paper—and the app in question, designed for the iPad, contains features such as graphics and video—the foundation reviews its guidelines annually, and broadening them to include e-books may be a natural next step.
"I wonder whether the tablet reader will lend itself to a new phase in the type of literary abstraction," Augenbraum told book culture website inReads, noting that the nominated app "combines text, graphics, and video in a seamless story. That will have an effect on the way we read. There will be people who will only want to read text, or watch video, and then there will be combinations."
Among the other books nominated for this year's awards are 191 poetry collections, 311 novels, and 441 nonfiction books.
For more of Augenbraum's behind-the-scenes perspective on the National Book Awards, check out the full interview at inReads. And stay tuned this fall as the NBF whittles down its list of nominees; the finalists for the ten-thousand-dollar prizes will be announced on October 12.
Go to a thrift store, explore an attic, or exchange with a friend three unfamiliar items: a piece of clothing, an object you can do something with—such as a coffee cup, a screw driver, or a letter opener, and a photograph or postcard. Wear the piece of clothing, use the object, and place the image in your work space where you can see it. Then write a scene about a character who is wearing the piece of clothing, while using the object, and has a memory filled with conflict conjured by the photograph or postcard.
Published this month by Melville House, Christopher Boucher's novel, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, tells the story of a newspaper reporter living in western Massachusetts and trying to raise his son, a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. To promote the book, Boucher yesterday set off on a road trip from Los Angeles to Boston in a 1972 Beetle.
The winners of the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award have been announced. The publication prize, which has bolstered authors such as Ha Jin and Antonya Nelson early in their careers, was awarded to E. J. Levy of Washington, D.C., and Hugh Sheehy of New York City. Each will receive one thousand dollars, and the University of Georgia Press will publish their books in the fall of 2012.
Levy, whose stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times, and the Nation, among other publications, won for her collection, My Life in Theory. She is also the editor of Lambda Award–winning anthology Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Harper Perennial, 1995).
Sheehy won for The Invisibles, which series editor Nancy Zafris described as a collection of “eerie tales extraordinarily narrated.” The title story from his winning manuscript appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos.
Along with Zafris, authors M. M. M. Hayes, Bruce Machart, Kirsten Ogden, and Lori Ostlund served as judges. The competition will accept submissions for the next O'Connor competition from April 1 to May 31, 2012.
In the video below, past winner Antonya Nelson—who received the O'Connor Award in 1989 for what became her debut collection, The Expendables—discusses the story behind her stories.
