The Green Shore
Natalie Bakopoulos, who was interviewed by Charles Baxter for this issue's roundup of debut fiction writers, talks about her Greek roots and her first novel, The Green Shore, published by Simon & Schuster this month.
Remembering Nora Ephron, Sandusky Replaced with Poet, and More
Nora Ephron, author of the best-selling novel, Heartburn, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, passed away yesterday in New York City; a consortium of California library systems is working out an agreement with self-publishing platform Smashwords; Bloomberg reports Google will unveil a tablet device at its developers conference in San Francisco; and other news.
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I'm Reading a Book
We thought we'd inject a little energy into our Wednesday with this music video by Julian Smith. Don't you ever interrupt me when I'm reading a book!
Meghan Daum on Success, Lonesome George Has Died, and More
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is considering dividing its publishing operations from its film and television divisions; Print magazine gathered visual art by famous writers, including work by Arthur Rimbaud, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sylvia Plath; novelist and essayist Meghan Daum answers an English teacher's request to write his students about success; and other news.
Natalie Diaz
The NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown recently spent some time with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), who is working to preserve the rapidly disappearing Mojave language.
We the People
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.
Recombinant Rhyme
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.
Erasure Essay
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.
ALA Gives First Awards for Adult Literature
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.
Trial Date Set for Antitrust Suit, Rereading Joseph Mitchell, and More
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.
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