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Chinese activist Zhu Yufu is facing a prison sentence for a poem he circulated on the Internet; Melville House ponders if James Franco's forthcoming novel will be a bestseller; eighteen days before Charles Bukowski died, he faxed a poem to his publisher; and other news.
“Two thousand eleven was a year of seismic change—I held my breath and leapt into self-employment, got a house, got a dog, and set foot in three separate countries (not including New Orleans at Mardi Gras, which, believe me, should also count). It was hard to find a second to read, and when I did, I seemed to gravitate toward novels preoccupied with place and class: Money (Viking, 1985) by Martin Amis, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), Ship of Fools (Little, Brown, 1962) by Katherine Anne Porter.
"In 1999 the noted Dutch historian Geert Mak, author of The Bridge (Vintage, 2009) and In Amsterdam (Atlas, 1995), set out to travel through Europe and take stock of the tumultuous century that was then just passing. His account, In Europe (Pantheon Books, 2007), is part travelogue, part history, and takes the unique approach of tying its historical and culture themes to specific European cities, cities that Mak returns to in recurring chapters at different times.
Pick up a dictionary and randomly choose ten words. Write a poem in five stanzas, with five lines in each stanza, using two of the ten words in each. Make the number of stressed syllables in each line consistent among the stanzas. (The first line of each stanza should have the same number of stressed syllables, etc.)
In the Realms of the Unreal, a documentary film directed by Jessica Yu, explores the mystery of Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor in Chicago who wrote perhaps the world's longest novel and became one of the most famous figures in outsider art.
We sat down with Elissa Schappell recently at a favorite New York City watering hole, Clandestino, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and over drinks and olives discussed the crucial role her long-time agent Joy Harris played in the writing of Schappell's recently published story collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls, published by Simon & Schuster in September. The book received considerable attention, making several “best of 2011” lists. It was also notable for appearing ten years after her debut, Use Me, a collection of linked short stories published by Morrow in 2000.
As is often the case when a first-time author sells a book of short fiction to a major publisher, the contract with Morrow was a two-book deal. The second book—at the time unwritten—was slated to be a novel, which traditionally perform better in the marketplace. Just as Schappell had done when she was writing Use Me, after she completed a substantial portion of the draft, which took a few years, she showed the manuscript to Joy Harris. Watch the video to hear what happened next.
“Though novels are what inspired me to want to be a writer—those of Salinger, Atwood, Nabokov, Winterson—I’ve spent most of my actual writing career publishing memoir and personal essays. Now that I’m knee deep into my first novel, though, I’ve been gorging on fiction again. In 2011 I loved Elissa Schappell’s Use Me (Harper Perennial, 2001), Kate Christensen’s The Astral (Doubleday, 2011), Helen Schulman’s This Beautiful Life (Harper, 2011), Eileen Myles’s Inferno, and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011).
Jonathan Galassi's new book, Left-handed, tells the story of a married man in mid-life who discovers he's gay; novelist Justin Torres and his mom, Theresa, recall their versions of a crisis that happened when Justin was a teenager; publishing industry veteran Jane Friedman explains how to get your book published; and other news.
The Detroit-based Kresge Foundation has awarded its 2012 Eminent Artist Award to Naomi Long Madgett, poet laureate of the city and author of ten poetry collections. Also a teacher and the founder of forty-year-old Lotus Press, Madgett received the fifty-thousand-dollar prize in honor of her contributions to poetry as well as her work promoting African American literature.
Foundation president Rip Rapson called Madgett "the embodiment of what it means to be an eminent artist," praising the poet for pursuing "a life of creativity while supporting other writers and poets, reaching across generations to spark in young people a love of words and writing, and maintaining a deep and abiding to commitment to the Detroit community."
"I've worked all my life trying to help people, poets and students," Madgett says. "I think we are here to serve. There’s a hymn—'If I Can Help Somebody'—that goes, 'If I can help somebody, as I pass along, then my living shall not be in vain.' It makes me very happy to leave a legacy of words that other people can relate to."
Previous winners of the Eminent Artist Award include poet and playwright Bill Harris, jazz trumpet player Marcus Belgrave, and visual artist Charles McGee, all of Detroit. The winners are nominated by an advisory council and selected by an independent panel, which this year included musicians Larry Gabriel and James E. Hart; Rebecca Mazzei, deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Robin Terry, chairman and executive director of the Motown Historical Museum; and Marilyn Wheaton, director of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum.
Below is a video poem of Madgett's "Alabama Centennial," originally collected in the book Star by Star, published by Detroit's Harlo Press in 1965.
This feature-length documentary, directed and produced by Doug Wilson, explores how the Linotype type casting machine (called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison) revolutionized printing and society and had a suprisingly powerful impact on people's lives.
