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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.
Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard's adaptation of the Tolstoy classic, starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Johnson, will be released in November.
Write a nonfiction piece of no more than 500 words. It could be anything from a single scene to a complete micro essay—either way, try to utilize the same techniques and structure that you would for a full-length piece. For inspiration, check out Brevity, an online journal dedicated to the art of flash nonfiction.
Best-selling author Alice Walker has refused an offer to publish a new Israeli edition of The Color Purple; Laura Miller explains why a filmed adaptation of the erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey may not be a bad idea; the Wall Street Journal details the battle for proper grammar at the the workplace; and other news.
In this video for Electric Literature's free fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, Sarah Bodil animates a sentence from "The Adventure of the Space Traveler" by Seth Fried, who was featured in last year's First Fiction Annual for this debut story collection, The Great Frustration.
