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Truman Capote's marked-up Breakfast at Tiffany's manuscript is up for auction; Colorado-based Mud Luscious Press has shuttered; Rumpus managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald has been named publicity director for McSweeney’s; and other news.
Believable, fully developed characters serve to engage readers and strengthen your stories. Choose a character from one of your stories-in-progress or imagine a character about whom you’d like to write. Compose a character sketch based on a day in the life of this character. Explore every detail of what this person does and why throughout one day. What are his or her morning rituals and routines? How does he or she go about choosing clothes? What does this person eat? What does the inside and outside of his or her car look like? How does he or she walk and what does it say about this person? Where does he or she go and why? Use this sketch to inform the revision or writing of a story.
The eighty-five-year-old prize-winning fiction writer whose new novel, All That Is, was published this month by Knopf, speaks at the New York State Writers Institute about The Lover by Marguerite Duras.
New York's Hudson Valley is a great place for independent bookstores; Charles Simic discusses decades of reading his poetry in venues across the country; the extraordinarily successful career of poet Carl Sandburg; and other news.
Write a Terza Rima, a poem of three-line stanzas in which the end-word of the second line in the first tercet establishes the rhyme for the first and third lines in the following tercet and so on. The poem can have as many stanzas as you’d like, and the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc. continues through the final stanza.
"All relationships between writers and readers are love stories," says Ruth Ozeki, author most recently of the novel A Tale for the Time Being (Viking, 2013), whose article "A Crucial Collaboration: Reader-Writer-Character-Book" appears in the current issue.
Authorities in Canada have approved the Penguin and Random House merger; Dani Shapiro discusses writing and distraction; GalleyCat details how self-published authors can sell their books at independent bookstores; and other news.
Novelist Chuck Palahniuk recently reminded fans that Fight Club was originally a failure; a lawmaker in West Virginia has proposed a bill to make science fiction compulsory reading in schools; recent Pulitzer winner Sharon Olds composed a poem after a Vogue photo shoot; and other news.
"If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything," said David Foster Wallace in this March 1996 interview with Leonard Lopate, animated by Patrick Smith.
The Butler University–based literary magazine Booth is currently accepting short story submissions for its annual literary prize. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Booth. The deadline is May 31.
Using the online submission system, writers may submit a story between 500 and 7,500 words with a $20 entry fee. All entries will be considered for publication. One runner-up will receive $250. Roxane Gay will judge. Butler University students and staff, as well as friends and students of the judge, are not eligible to enter.
Established in 2009, Booth publishes two print issues per year, and features one author or new piece of writing on its website every week. The staff is comprised of students in the MFA program at Butler University in Indianapolis. The annual prize alternates genres each year, and the editors accept general submissions, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and comics, from September through April.
Visit the website for more information and complete submission guidelines, and check out the current installation of Poets & Writers Magazine's Literary MagNet to hear more from the Booth editors about future plans for the journal.
The current issue of Booth, above, features cover art and interior comics by Dustin Harbin.
