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Writing fiction in the first-person plural is notoriously tricky. Challenge yourself to write a short story—or a section of a short story—from the first-person plural. Read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” for insight on how a collective narrator can enhance a story and/or produce unexpected effects.
In a 2008 Paris Review interview with Kay Ryan, she explains her neologism “recombinant rhyme”—a craft technique of stashing “rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middle.” According to Ryan, “snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem” allows her to “get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.” Take a poem of yours that could use more musicality, and revise it to include recombinant rhyme.
The erasure is a poetic form created by obscuring words and phrases from an existing text and using those that remain to construct a poem. Apply the erasure to an essay. Make a copy of three or four pages of your favorite essay. Then, using a black marker or Wite-out, compose a short lyric essay by selecting certain words on the pages and erasing the rest.
The American Library Association awarded its inaugural Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Literature at a ceremony last night in Anaheim, California.
The organization that has for decades awarded the Caldecott and Newbery medals for children's and young adult literature is honoring for the first time books of fiction and nonfiction for adult readers.
Irish author and Man Booker alumna Anne Enright took the Carnegie Award in fiction for her fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz, published in the United States by Norton. Also shortlisted were Russell Banks for his twelfth novel, Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco), and Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell for her first, Swamplandia! (Knopf).
In nonfiction, Robert K. Massie's biography Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House) won the Carnegie Award. The late Manning Marable's much-lauded biography Malcolm X (Viking) and James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon) were also finalists.
Each winner, selected by a committee chaired by librarian Nancy Pearl, received five thousand dollars, and each finalist received fifteen hundred dollars. As with the Caldecott and Newbery medals, copies of the honored books will also be decorated with a seal announcing the award.
Judge Denise Cote set a trial date for the Justice's Department's e-book antitrust suit; the New Tork Times visits with London transplant Martin Amis at his brownstone in Brooklyn, New York; Flavorwire rounded up inspiring letters from authors to young fans, including Roald Dahl, Harold Pinter, and Harper Lee; and other news.
Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award went this year to debut novelist Anna Funder for her best-seller All That I Am (Harper). Funder, whose novel of the Nazi resistance in Europe also won her country's Independent Bookseller’s Award for debut fiction and was named Indie Book of the Year, received $50,000 Australian (approximately $50,355).
Funder is also the author of the Samuel Johnson Prize–winning nonfiction book Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, published by Granta Books in 2003, which the author wrote after making a shift from previous careers in international law and television production in Germany. Her award-winning debut novel also carries threads of the real, particularly stories of pre-World War II activists who opposed Hitler's rise to power, some culled from the author's personal relationship with a German refugee living in Australia.
The other contenders for this year's Miles Franklin Award are Blood by Tony Birch, Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears, Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse, and Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett. The award is given annually for a novel that "presents Australian life in any of its phases."
In the video below, Funder describes the challenges of shaping her novel, including the importance, while crafting fiction from historical events, of getting the story "morally right."
The U.S. government claims Apple is trying to rush the antitrust lawsuit filed against it, Poetry Parnassus plans to drop 100,000 poems from a helicopter over London, only 12 percent of e-book readers borrowed digital books from libraries last year, and more.
Check out German designer Marcel Schindler's stop-motion adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, set to the song "Sail" by Awolnation, that uniquely captures Santiago's epic struggle with the giant marlin.
Ken Auletta discusses how the e-book pricing war may alter the future of publishing; the New York Times looks at the book market in France, where independent book stores are thriving, and price-fixing reigns; the Millions profiles "America’s greatest self-published novelist," New Jersey public defender Sergio De La Pava; and other news.
New York City's Center for Fiction, which annually honors writers with its Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Clifton Fadiman Medal, is accepting entries for a new short story contest. One story will be selected to be published in the Literarian, the center's journal, and the winning author will receive one thousand dollars.
For the inaugural competition, stories of up to five thousand words may be submitted via e-mail by July 2. A fifteen dollar entry fee is payable via the center's online store.
The current issue of the Literarian features a story-as-slideshow by Roberta Allen, an essay by memoirist and fiction writer Esmeralda Santiago, a fiction translation from the Spanish of Raúl Ortega Alfonso excerpted from the Barcelona Review, and recommended reading from author Dan Chaon alongside stories by emerging writers. The magazine is accessible for free on the Center for Fiction website.
In the video below, featured in the latest issue of the Literarian, Joyce Carol Oates discusses the dream that gave life to her novel Mudwoman, published this past March by Ecco.
