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A breakdown of the potential antitrust lawsuit aimed at Apple and large publishers; Fifty Shades of Grey, a best-selling erotic novel published by a small press in Australia, launched a seven-figure bidding war among the major publishers; poet Charles Bernstein writes that PennSound has made available over one hundred recordings of 1990s-era readings at the Ear Inn in New York City; and other news.
"This man is pretending to be Billy Collins, so call the police!" Check out the former poet laureate in this episode of the children's show Martha Speaks, which will be aired on PBS on April 2 in celebration of National Poetry Month.
The New York Times has more on the Justice Department's potential lawsuit against Apple and several publishers over e-book pricing; Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, is the new owner of the venerable magazine the New Republic; Reese Witherspoon has purchased the film rights to Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild; and other news.
The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Among the winners was Edith Pearlman, whose fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), had also been nominated for the National Book Award last year, and went on to win the PEN/Malamud Award.
In poetry, Laura Kasischke won for her collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), which recently received the first Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. Mira Bartók won in autobiography for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press).
Awards were also given in criticism, to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press); in biography, to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); and in general nonfiction, to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).
Awards were also given to reviewer Kathryn Schulz, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books, who won this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the video below, Pearlman reads from her winning collection.
In case you missed it, here's the trailer for Liz Moore's second novel, Heft, the story of the unlikely connection between a former academic, Arthur Opp, who weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade, and seventeen-year-old Kel Keller, a poor kid in a rich school who pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career. Heft was published in January by Norton.
The United States Justice Department intends to sue Apple and five of the largest publishers; WNYC features Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection Lunch Poems; the staff blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the work of Víctor Terán, a poet attempting to save his endangered Isthmus Zapotec language; and other news.
Actor Dave Foley (The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio) reads "Suck It," a poem from Suzanne Weber's To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born: Revenge Poems for Babies and Toddlers, forthcoming from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April.
In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking, 2005), Rebecca Solnit discusses the importance of allowing yourself to get lost—both in life and in writing—in order to become more fully conscious. The art of getting lost, she says, "is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss." Write about a time when you got lost—physically, emotionally, spiritually, or otherwise—and how getting lost, and perhaps embracing that loss, resulted in something new being found.
To mark the birthday of John Updike, Random House will reissue some of the author's books, and make Updike's entire backlist available as e-books; Richard Russo and Andre Dubus III discuss the difficulties of writing memoir, an audio walking tour of poetry associated with New York City's East Village neighborhood has been created, narrated by Jim Jarmusch; and other news.
Fill in the generalities with details and use the following to begin a scene for a story: CHARACTER NAME sits at his/her desk in his/her office above Guiliani's Pizza on STREET NAME in CITY NAME. He/she leans down and removes his/her shoes, placing them neatly by the bookcase, then picks up the phone.
