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Wool, a science fiction series self-published last year by Hugh Howey and subsequently acquired by Random House UK for publication next January and optioned for film by director Ridley Scott and producer Steve Zaillian, is "the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge." The folks at Random House UK put together a pretty slick trailer; check it out.
Jamie McGuire's Beautiful Disaster, the lead title from GalleyCat's self-published best-sellers list, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint; a twelfth-century manuscript stolen last year has been found; the late Christopher Hitchens on the life and work of George Orwell; and other news.
On December 17, 1977, Charles Bernstein read poems from Senses of Responsibility and Shade on Public Access Poetry, a cable television series that aired in 1977 and 1978. While the quality isn't great in places (it was the seventies, after all), this and dozens of other clips offer a unique glimpse of poets such as Bernstein, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Bob Holman thirty-five years ago.
Granta asks some of the best young novelists in Brazil for an essential Brazilian reading list; the Millions looks for the greatest New Jersey novel; the Rumpus unravels a tragic historic event that took place in 1898 in the bucolic coastal town of Wilmington, North Carolina; and other news.
"I saw some shit that needed to be spoken, so I just said it." This and other priceless quotes are featured in this moving collage for an event by the Guild Literary Complex and the University of Chicago celebrating the life and work of pioneering poet Gil Scott-Heron, who passed away last May.
Write a story in which only five minutes pass between the beginning of the story and the end. Experiment with the ways in which you can draw out these five minutes, through interior monologue, flashbacks, switching between different points of view, and other storytelling techniques.
In her essay “The Art of Finding” originally published in American Poet in 2006, Linda Gregg advises poets to be more attuned to the physical world and to find concrete images that possess a special vibrancy. Gregg writes about how she asks her students to keep “a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things.” Try this exercise for one week, and at the end of the week, use two images from your journal in a poem.
According to his brother, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is suffering from dementia; the Guardian details how Brooklyn became a welcome habitat for writers; Anna Holmes explores the criticism of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls, and Sheila Heti’s new novel How Should a Person Be?; and other news.
Julia Loktev's adaptation of a story by Tom Bissell (who was profiled in the magazine back in 2007) stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as an engaged couple on a trek through Georgia, the country. The Loneliest Planet will open in theaters on October 26.
Novelist Patrick Somerville writes of the experience of having his novel This Bright River panned, then part of the review retracted; Teju Cole examines the underpinnings of the recent destruction of ancient Sufi shrines in Mali's Timbuktu by al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters; the Boston Phoenix focuses on gender inequality in National Public Radio's book coverage; and other news.
