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It all started in Seattle: Starbucks, grunge, and ... the "one book, one city" program. In the four years since Nancy Pearl organized a Seattle-based reading of Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter, the idea has spread across the country.
So how did John Dufresne—the eldest of four children of French-Canadian parents, a boy who grew up in the Catholic, blue-collar Grafton Hill neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts, a boy for whom it was beyond imagining that a man might find his vocation in words—become a noted short story writer, a sought-after teacher of creative writing, and the author of three acclaimed novels, two of which are set well below the Mason-Dixon line? In part, the answer is a keen ear for the music of language and an eye for the telling detail.
Graywolf Press, a 26-year-old literary nonprofit publisher based in St. Paul, has entered into a new distribution deal with New York publishing giant Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Now that the explosive growth of the dot-com industry has abated, many are wondering if the same fate awaits electronic publishing. At the annual Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, where a sober crowd gathered in October 2001, just weeks after the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the Pollyannaish predictions of recent years about e-books were replaced by a more uncertain tone.
Thirty-six years after his death, John Steinbeck—the Nobel Prize–winning author of American classics like The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden—is the focus of the largest-ever centenary celebration for a single author. Born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, Steinbeck is being remembered with a yearlong program of over 175 events in 39 states.
The New York Times began publishing original poetry in the Book Review on February 17. New York City poet Nathanial Bellows's "Harm's Woods" was the first entry in what will be a regular feature of the Sunday edition of the newspaper.
On February 2, over 170 writers, editors, agents, and publishers from five continents attended a two-day writers conference in Geneva, Switzerland—an intensive weekend of workshops, readings, panel discussions, and networking.
Nominees for the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on January 28.
Michael P. Hammond, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, died on January 29 of what appeared to be natural causes. He was 69. Hammond had officially assumed his duties as chairman on January 22.
