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Poetry is an act of appreciation. With our increasingly busy schedules, we lose our ability to appreciate. Poets must resist the modern temptation to overlook what holds meaning in our lives. Identify something in your surroundings—a rusted hoe draped in spider webs, an unfashionable dress abandoned by time, a wine cork buried in a drawer of unpaid bills—and write a poem that appreciates these lonely items.
Alice Munro will not travel to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature; the Telegraph published exclusive excerpts from Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch; Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild has inspired hikers to take to the Pacific Crest Trail; and other news.
Poet Charles Simic weighs in on the current state of American society; 2paragraphs speaks with Poetry magazine editor Don Share; Randy Susan Meyers examines the usefullness of an outline; and other news.
Harper Lee has filed a lawsuit against her Alabama hometown’s Monroe County Heritage Museum; Businessweek peers inside the corporate structure of Amazon; Joan Didion was advised by her doctor not to travel to California to receive a PEN lifetime achievement award; and other news.
What type of query letter piques your interest?
One that's as well written as the book itself. Even better is one that's short, pithy, and demonstrates the author's understanding of, and aspirations for, how the book will be received as part of the literary and cultural conversation. I'm much more interested in knowing why an author wrote something and what kinds of books and authors inspired her, than I am in a lengthy synopsis. The latter should take no more than one paragraph.
People often collect strange things for unknown reasons: ceramic elves from Europe, antique trout fishing lures, bamboo backscratchers from around the world. What we collect often reveals our idiosyncrasies, and therefore our true natures. Recall someone in your life who collected something intriguing or odd. Try to define the attraction, and in the process, bring that person to life.
P&W’s latest issue explores self-publishing, so today’s featured video clip is a book trailer for Wool, which was originally self-published in 2011 as a short story by independent writer Hugh Howey.
An exhibition of poet John Ashbery’s possessions is on display in New York City; Eric Pomerance and Laurie Gwen Shapiro visit with impersonators who spend days as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott; Thomas Frank casts a gimlet eye on the rise of the creativity expert; and other news.
Eleanor Catton was awarded the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for The Luminaries, an epic novel set in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Catton, twenty-eight, is the youngest person to ever receive the prize.
Born in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, Catton began writing the book, her second novel, at age twenty-five. The previous youngest recipient of the award, Ben Okri, won the prize in 1991 at age thirty-two. At 848 pages, The Luminaries (published by Granta in Britain and Little, Brown in the U.S.) is also the longest novel to win the award. Catton is only the second person from New Zealand to win. 
The prize was announced at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall. Chair of judges Robert Macfarlane called the book a “dazzling work, luminous, vast” with an “extraordinarily gripping” narrative. “The Luminaries is a novel you pan, as if for gold, and the returns are huge,” Macfarlane said. “Maturity is evident in every sentence, in the rhythms and balances. It is a novel of astonishing control.”
Catton beat out five other finalists for the prize: We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo; Harvest by Jim Crace; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; and The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. According British betting site Ladbrokes, Crace was the favorite to win. Catton will receive £50,000, or about $80,000.
It’s been a few good years for historical fiction, Hilary Mantel having won the prize both in 2009 and 2012 for Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, respectively, the first two books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the Booker has been awarded annually for forty-five years to a novelist from the United Kingdom, Ireland, or the British Commonwealth. Last month, however, the Booker Prize Foundation announced that, beginning in 2014, the prize would be open to all novels written in English and published in the United Kingdom, regardless of the author’s nationality.
In total, 151 books were nominated for this year’s prize. The winner is selected by the judging panel on the day of the ceremony.
Our characters reveal themselves through their actions—not only in dramatic scenes that involve death, injury, or heartache, but in small, subtle ways too. Show how a character in your fiction eats. Is the character’s demeanor ravenous and paranoid or slow and sophisticated? How your character eats, appreciates, and relates to food reveals much about his or her upbringing, emotional state, and intellectual disposition.
