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Given that paper accounts for a quarter of all landfill volume, it should probably come as no surprise that a recent study touted e-books as more environmentally friendly than traditional publishing. A report released this month by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group found that Amazon’s Kindle device could generate a net savings in carbon emissions—a savings that increases as print consumption is displaced.
The U.K. newspaper the Guardian announced today the ten semifinalists for its 2009 First Book Award. The winner, whose book will be selected from a field of poetry, fiction, memoir, and nonfiction works, will receive ten thousand pounds (approximately sixteen thousand dollars).
The longlisted authors are:
Eleanor Catton for her novel The Rehearsal (Granta)
Petina Gappah for her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly (Faber and Faber)
Samantha Harvey for her novel The Wilderness (Jonathan Cape)
Siân Hughes for her poetry collection The Missing (Salt Publishing)
Reif Larsen for his novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Harvill)
Ali Shaw for her novel The Girl With Glass Feet (Atlantic)
Gabriel Weston for her memoir Direct Red (Jonathan Cape)
Three writers of nonfiction books were also selected as semifinalists. They are Edward Hollis for The Secret Lives of Buildings (Portobello), Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man (Faber and Faber), and Michael Peel for A Swamp Full of Dollars (I. B. Tauris).
The judges for this year's prize are Claire Armitstead, Nadeem Aslam, John Gray, Tobias Hill, Martha Kearney, and Katharine Vinero. To aid in their selection of the winner, the judging panel will be offered commentary from five reading groups assembled by the U.K. bookstore Waterstone's. In November the group will reveal its shortlist of five authors and the winner will be announced in December.
The annual prize, past winners of which include Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith, is open to all debut authors writing in English.
Both opponents and supporters of the Google Book settlement are closing ranks as the September 4 deadline for court filings approaches. This week saw attacks on the deal from the Open Book Alliance—a group comprising Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others—as well as sharp criticism from the Urban Libraries Council. Meanwhile, Sony filed documents on Wednesday praising Google’s massive book-scanning venture as a boon for consumers.
The University of Iowa Press announced today the winners of the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize, both of them receiving the honor for debut collections. The prize, which is given annually to both emerging and established writers, went to Samuel Amadon for Like a Sea and Molly Brodak for A Little Middle of the Night. Their books will be published by the press next March, and each writer will receive a standard royalty contract.
Amadon is the author of the chapbooks Advice for Young Couples from H_NGM_N B_ _KS, Goodnight Lung from Octopus Books, Each H from Ugly Duckling Presse, and Spy Poem, released by Projective Industries, the chapbook press where he serves as coeditor. He received his MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, where he teaches as a graduate fellow. "Rather than create worlds," University of Iowa Press said of Amadon's poems in the awards announcement, "they point out what a strange world already exists."
Brodak, whose Instructions for a Painting was selected by Reginald Shepherd for the 2007 GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series, received her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University and teaches at Augusta State University. The press noted that her collection "simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself."
The next deadline for the prize is April 30, 2010.
Preparations are underway for the seventeenth National Arts and Humanities Month, a country-wide smorgasbord of public events, open houses, and media coverage coordinated each October by the nonprofit advocacy group Americans for the Arts.
The Academy of American Poets announced yesterday that poet Marvin Bell will judge the 2010 Walt Whitman Award, given for a first poetry collection. Bell's debut collection, published in 1966 by Stone Wall Press, is Things We Dreamt We Died For, and his most recent book is 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book (Trinity University Press, 2009), a collaborative project with six other writers.
The winner of the Whitman Award, which will open for entries on September 15, will receive a prize of five thousand dollars, publication of his or her winning manuscript by Louisiana State University Press, and a monthlong residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson. Writers who have not published a poetry collection in a standard edition—that is, a book of forty pages or more in length that was released in an edition of five hundred copies or more—may submit a manuscript of fifty to one hundred pages between September 15 and November 15 with a twenty-five-dollar entry fee. Poets who have published chapbooks or books in limited editions still eligible. An entry form and complete guidelines are available on the Academy Web site.
The winner is expected to be announced in May 2010. Last year's award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, was given to J. Michael Martinez of Boulder, Colorado, for his debut collection, Heredities, which will be published next spring.
To read a selection of poems by Bell, and to link to an interview with him conducted by Rebecca Seiferle, visit the Academy's Web page on the poet.
The 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival will be held after all. Seven months after Dodge Foundation CEO David Grant announced the suspension of the popular biennial event, citing shrinking assets and increasing venue costs, the New York Times reports that the organization is on track to secure a new hosting partner by September.
Plans are underway in Lowell, Massachusetts for the seventh annual Jack Kerouac 5K Road Race, a 3.1-mile run through the city where the eponymous Beat writer was born and eventually buried. Proceeds from the event, scheduled for Sunday, September 27, will fund the Jack Kerouac Scholarship, awarded each year to a graduate of Lowell High School, the author’s alma mater.
Due to the popularity of the first Three-Minute Fiction Contest, National Public Radio (NPR) is giving writers a second chance to submit their short short stories. This round of the contest, judged once again by writer and critic James Wood, asks writers to begin their pieces with the line "The nurse left work at five o'clock."
Stories must be no longer than six hundred words, and may be submitted via an e-mail form on the NPR Web site. The contest closes tonight at 11:59 PM. Favorite stories will be posted on the site, and the winning tale will be read by Wood on air.
Molly Reid, who teaches composition and literature at Colorado State University, won the inaugural contest earlier this summer for her story "Not That I Care," selected from over five thousand submissions. Along with Reid's winning work, the finalists' pieces can be viewed online at NPR's Three-Minute Fiction series page.
A coalition of organizations representing artists and cultural workers has entered the national debate on healthcare reform. Americans for the Arts, in conjunction with twenty other national nonprofit groups, has called on Congress to enact a public health insurance option for individual artists, along with measures making it easier for cash-strapped cultural organizations to provide adequate coverage for employees.
