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The Center for Book Arts in New York City is celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the Vandercook Proof printing press with a series of events and the publication of the limited edition Vandercook Book, a collaborative artist book featuring work created using the press.
Barnes & Noble last week announced that it had acquired New Jersey-based e-book retailer Fictionwise for $15.7 million. In a press release, the bookseller said it plans to integrate Fictionwise into a digital strategy that includes the launch of an e-bookstore later this year.
The thirteenth annual Small Press Month, a nationwide celebration of the contributions of independent book publishers, is underway. Cosponsored by the New York Center for Independent Publishing, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Independent Book Publishers Association, the schedule of events includes readings, book launches, author appearances, and other events that shore up support for and promote unity among small presses.
The shrine and grave of Sufi poet Rahman Baba, located outside the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, were bombed on Thursday, and according to local authorities, members of the Taliban are suspected of the attack.
Wednesday was a busy day for book awards ceremonies in New York City. At the New School last night, Tobias Wolff was named winner of the annual Story Prize for Our Story Begins (Knopf, 2008), edging out finalists Jumpha Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf) and Joe Meno (Demons in the Spring, Akashic Books). Earlier in the day, Gin Phillips and David Sheff were named winners of Barnes & Noble's sixteenth Discover Great New Writers Awards. Phillips won in fiction for her debut novel The Well and the Mine (Hawthorne Books) and Sheff won in nonfiction for his memoir Beautiful Boy (Houghton Mifflin).
Wolff received twenty thousand dollars, while Phillips and Sheff each received ten thousand dollars as well as a year of additional marketing and merchandising support from Barnes & Noble. But the winners aren't the only ones with a little extra coin in the bank today. Story Prize finalists Lahiri and Meno each received five thousand dollars, while the second- and third-place finalists in the Discover Great New Writers Awards program each received five thousand dollars and twenty-five hundred dollars respectively. Those finalists are Benjamin Tayler for The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press) and Zachary Lazar for Sway (Little, Brown) in fiction and Eric Weiner for The Geography of Bliss (Twelve) and Nia Wyn for Blue Sky July (Dutton) in nonfiction.
That's sixty-five thousand dollars doled out to nine writers on one day in one city, which, considering today's installment of Daily News, is cause for either excitement or resentment, depending on your disposition.
The National Endowment for the Arts released a new study yesterday that shows the unemployment rate among the nation's working artists, including writers, hit 6 percent in the final quarter of 2008. The unemployment rate for writers and authors alone is slightly higher: 6.6 percent.
Poet Sonia Sanchez, author of sixteen books and a Cave Canem faculty member, has received the 2009 Robert Creeley Award. A ceremony will be held on March 23 at the R. J. Grey Jr. High School Auditorium in Acton, Massachusetts; admission is free. Sanchez also will select books that have influenced her writing for inclusion in the Acton Memorial Library collection.
In its ninth year, the Creeley Award honors the memory of Robert Creeley, who lived in Acton, Massachusetts, from the age of four to fifteen. It has brought a variety of distinguished poets, including Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Martin Espada, and C. D. Wright, to read in Acton. Last year's winner was John Ashbery. Take a look:
Starting today, owners of iPhone and iPod Touch can download a version of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader from Apple’s App Store.
The township of Montclair, New Jersey, recently offered to host the financially beleagured Dodge Poetry Festival, a biennial event sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. The festival, which was founded in 1986 in Waterloo Village, New Jersey, and moved to Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2003, was suspended earlier this year.
