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The New York Public Library's newly renovated reading room now includes a book train, an adorable and technologically impressive book delivery system with cars running over a total of 950 feet of horizontal and vertical track, which provides an efficient and enjoyable experience for staffers and visitors.
This past weekend, the New York Review of Books published an exposé in an attempt to uncover the true identity of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, provoking anger and criticism from those in support of the writer’s wish to remain anonymous. Have you ever wished for anonymity, or do you imagine that you might in the future? Drawing examples from your own experiences with writing and private versus public life, write a personal essay about the issues at stake in this situation, such as celebrity authors, sexism, and the changing relationship in contemporary culture between artist and audience.
Submissions are open for the sixth annual StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize, given for a short story. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Issue 50 of StoryQuarterly. Alexander Chee will judge.
Using the online submission system, submit a story of up to 6,250 words with a $15 entry fee by October 15. All entries will be considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Judge Alexander Chee is the author of two novels, most recently the historical epic The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). “I speak to so many young writers who still have various cynical ideas about how one gets ahead,” said Chee in a February interview with the Toast. “Really, just do your best work, stand up for yourself, stay close to your excitement. Yes, the asymmetry between effort and reward in writing is the hardest part of it in many ways—the things you work on forever that receive little or no acknowledgement or pay, the things written quickly that pay enormously or that fly around the Internet, viral—but just keep writing.”
Established in 1975 and based at Rutgers University in Camden, StoryQuarterly publishes fiction and nonfiction. The journal, edited by writer Paul Lisicky, is released quarterly in print and administers a fiction contest in the fall and a nonfiction contest in the spring. Previous winners of the Fiction Prize include Nafissa Thompson-Spires for her story “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology,” Anne Ray for her story “The Pool,” and Janet Peery for her story “No Boy At All.”
Other fiction contests with upcoming deadlines include the University of Louisville’s Calvino Prize, Cutthroat’s Writing Awards, Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Contest, and Omnidawn Publishing’s Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest. For a full list of upcoming contests, visit the Grants & Awards database.
Photo: Alexander Chee; Credit: M. Sharkey
October book recommendations; National Book Award winner Phil Klay’s open letter to Donald Trump; how novelists write about climate change; and other news.
American Stanzas: 2006–2016 is a photography and mixed media arts show presenting work by poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The exhibition is sponsored by Poets House and Cave Canem Foundation.
“This is what I believe in, what I trust will ultimately distinguish those who want to write and publish from those who do write and publish: work....I believe that the act of writing is itself the muse.” In Naming the World, author and professor Bret Anthony Johnston has compiled a collection of craft advice from a wide range of his favorite writers and teachers of writing, including Dorothy Allison, Dan Chaon, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Robbins, and Vu Tran. Each chapter acts as a short master class filled with insights and experienced perspectives, as well as varied and illuminating exercises and prompts designed to inspire writers seeking to improve their narrative writing skills.
Last week, after a swarm of almost one hundred small earthquakes in the Salton Sea region, California’s Office of Emergency Services issued an earthquake advisory to Southern California residents warning of the potential of a larger earthquake occurring on the San Andreas fault. Write a short story in which the main plotline’s background includes the looming threat of a major earthquake. How does this create tension in the atmosphere and bring out different personality traits in each character?
A reader’s guide to the fall’s big literary awards; The Women of Brewster Place novelist Gloria Naylor has died; London theater will present the first stage adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels; and other news.
At the Wheeler Centre, Hanya Yanagihara speaks about how her novel A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015) is “willfully out of step” with contemporary literature. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award in 2015, the novel has been optioned by producer Scott Rudin as a limited series.
The first Nobel Prize winner of 2016, announced in the Physiology or Medicine category this week, was awarded to Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi. Ohsumi is a cell biologist who won the prize for his studies of autophagy, Greek for “self eating,” a process in which the cells in our body break down or destroy, and then recycle, certain component parts. Write a poem inspired by the workings of the human body at a cellular level. You may find ideas by looking at different vocabulary and terminology, or drawing connections between cellular functions and processes to situations in your emotional life and interpersonal relationships.
