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Write a poem in which you give the reader directions about how to assemble an object or an emotional experience. Think of the various sensory stimuli your directions provide and experiment with the order of the lines. For inspiration, read Matthea Harvey’s poem “Setting the Table.”
Oprah's Book Club is back—her first pick is Cheryl Strayed's Wild; PEN American Center's Executive Director Steven Isenberg announced he'll leave the organization at the end of 2012; Jezebel found a perfume that smells like your favorite novel; and other news.
The release of Oscar Corral's independent documentary film will coincide with the October publication of Tom Wolfe's fourth novel, Back to Blood, which is set in Miami and focuses on the subject of immigration.
Federal judge Denny Chin certified the class-action status of authors suing Google over book scanning; the Guardian's created an interactive literary map of the United Kingdom and Ireland; a first edition of the Book of Mormon was stolen from an Arizona bookstore; and other news.
Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, one of the books generating a lot of prepublication buzz this summer, sets the coming-of-age story of an eleven-year-old girl against the backdrop of a natural calamity unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Foreign rights to The Age of Miracles have already been sold in more than two dozen countries; Random House will publish it in the U.S. later this month.
Last week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced James Salter as the winner of its twenty-fifth annual PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. The author, whose collection Dusk and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1988) won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, will receive the five-thousand-dollar prize named in honor of story writer Bernard Malamud on December 7.
Salter is also the author of the story collection Last Night (Knopf, 2005), as well as novels such as A Sport and a Pastime (Doubleday, 1967), Light Years (Random House, 1975), and The Hunters (Harper, 1956). Also recognizing his contribution to short story form, he was awarded the 2010 Rea Award last summer.
Below is a brief digest of online access points to the literature and life of the author PEN/Malamud juror Alan Cheuse said "has shown us how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn."
In a 1993 Paris Review interview (with Edward Hirsch), Salter said, "I've never had a story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected." (Salter's story "Last Night" is available online in the November 18, 2002, issue of the New Yorker.) He also discusses practice (in solitude, in longhand), revision ("Normally I just go a sentence at a time"), and his own short fiction influences (Babel, Chekhov).
The Paris Review published a number of Salter stories, including "Am Strande von Tanger" (Fall 1968). Last year the journal awarded Salter the Hadada Prize, and celebrated the author with a month of coverage on the Paris Review Daily blog. (Online literary review fwriction paid similar tribute.)
The video below, the first in a series of four, Salter reads "Palm Court" from Last Night. The reading took place at an event held by the literary journal Narrative.
Author Robin Black writes with candor about the green-eyed monster; NPR details an unusual legal battle in Israel over the papers of Franz Kafka; a rare 1959 recording of Flannery O’Connor; and other news.
Anyone who sits down to write a brand-new poem, story, essay—anything—will likely relate to this short film by Henrique Barone, who completed it while he was a student at Vancouver Film School last year. "Maybe a giant robot...or a crazy musician...no,no, an old lady...and a snake...well, this idea is not working."
In Bird by Bird (Pantheon, 1994), Anne Lamott's classic instructional treatise on writing and life, the author says: "Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing." Keeping this in mind, write the beginnings of an essay whose direction and ending you don't yet know. Start small, focusing closely on a single place, person, or incident, without thinking ahead. Then keep going: Allow the writing to tell the story, and see what develops.
Laura Miller looks at our first literary imaginings of little green men; Mike Shatzkin previews the upcoming panel discussions at Publishers Launch BEA; designer Craig Mod examines the evolution of the book cover; and other news.
