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There is someone inside a house at night who is startled by a knock at the door. Outside the door are two people. Complete this scene by considering the following questions: Who is the person inside the house? What is he (or she) doing when he hears the knock? Does he know why the pair are at the door? Who are the pair? What do they want? After completing the opening scene, write the story of what happens next.
The Association of German Publishers and Booksellers Foundation (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Stiftung) has announced the five finalists for its 2011 German Book Prize. The winning novelist will receive twenty-five thousand euros (approximately thirty-four thousand dollars).
The shortlisted books are Against the World by Jan Brandt, Das Wunderhorn by Michael Buselmeier, The Girl by Angelika Klüssendorf, Blumenberg by Sibylle Lewitscharoff, In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge, and The Hurtress by Marlene Streeruwitz. None of the shortlisted books have yet to be translated in the United States—after all, the art of translation takes time—but given the track record of German Book Prize honorees, perhaps these authors will appear on this side of the Atlantic in the near future.
It may have taken a few years, but 2007 winner Julia Franck saw her winning novel, Die Mittagsfrau (Lady Midday), published in English last year as The Blindness of the Heart (Grove Press). And 2006 winner Katharina Hacker's novel Die Habenichtse was published as The Have-Nots two years after her award by Europa Editions. Just this past April, inaugural 2005 prizewinner Arno Geiger saw his novel Es geht uns gut appear in English as We Are Doing Fine (Ariadne Press).
The 2011 winner will receive the award in mid-October at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where finalists will also receive prizes. The five remaining authors will take home twenty-five hundred euros (roughly thirty-four hundred dollars) each.
1Q84, the eagerly anticipated tome by Haruki Murakami, will be published by Knopf next month. The image of the book at the end of this trailer doesn't do it justice: The novel is nearly 950 pages long.
In this sketch from Monty Python’s 1973 album, “Matching Tie and Handkerchief,” a crowd gathers to watch Thomas Hardy begin his latest novel, The Return of the Native, while an announcer provides a running commentary.
The recently-released longlist for Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize, worth fifty thousand dollars Canadian, has echoes of the Man Booker Prize shortlist. The two Canadian novelists, Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers) and Esi Edugyan (Half Blood Blues), up for Britain's major book prize are also in the running for one of their home country's top literary honors.
Also longlisted for the Giller are:
The Free World by David Bezmozgis (HarperCollins)
The Meagre Tarmac by Clarke Blaise (Biblioasis)
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady (House of Anansi)
The Beggar's Garden by Michael Christie (HarperCollins)
Extensions by Myrna Dey (Nunatak First Fiction)
The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott (Doubleday)
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner (Hamish Hamilton)
Solitaria by Genni Gunn (Signature Editions)
Into the Heart of the Country by Pauline Holdstock (HarperCollins)
A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston (Knopf)
The Return by Dany Laferrière (translated from the French by David Homel) (Douglas & McIntyre)
Monoceros by Suzette Mayr (Coach House Books)
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland & Stewart)
Touch by Alexi Zentner (Knopf)
Dey's Extensions has already received a Giller honor of sorts, being nominated via public vote for a spot on the longlist. The debut novel had the most nominations out of the roughly four thousand received last month by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), a sponsor of the Giller. (The CBC is now inviting Canadian residents to select their own shortlists from the semifinalists, for a chance at taking home some literary booty: a Kobo e-reader, a gift certificate to Canadian bookseller Chapters Indigo, and a set of the finalists' books.)
The shortlist will be announced later this fall, followed by the winner ceremony, broadcast by the CBC on November 8.
The video below is a trailer for deWitt's novel, set across the border in the American West of the 1850s.
Using one of your own stories or one by another author, rewrite the story from the perspective of one of the minor characters.
This clip from early 1967 includes footage of Jack Kerouac shooting pool at the Pawtucketville Social Club in Lowell, Massachusetts, and an audio recording of Kerouac reading the beginning of "San Francisco Scene."
The shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize was announced today, including first-time novelists Stephen Kelman and A. D. Miller. The two, along with four other authors, are in contention for a prize of fifty thousand pounds (approximately eighty thousand dollars).
The shortlisted titles, chosen from thirteen semifinalists, are The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape), Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books), The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta), Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail), Pigeon English by Kelman (Bloomsbury), and Snowdrops by Miller (Atlantic). DeWitt and Edugyan both hail from Canada, and the other four authors are British.
On October 18 the winner will be announced at London's Guildhall. The five runners-up won't leave the ceremony empty-handed; each will receive an award of twenty five hundred pounds (about four thousand dollars).
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.
