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The American Booksellers Association requests ABA members make their thoughts known on the agency model to the Department of Justice; twenty-four people recently undertook a full-scale re-enactment of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; author Emily St. John Mandel considers genre fiction and the marketing labels placed on books; and other news.
This month's selection from Motionpoems is Adam Tow's visual interpretation of David Wagoner's poem "Thoreau and the Lightning," from the collection After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).
In the ongoing court battle over book scans, Google seeks to dismiss the Authors Guild class-action suit; Time magazine visits author John Irving at his New Hampshire home; the professional life of Jane Austen; and other news.
Last night we attended a unique book launch for New York City poet Elana Bell, featured in our May/June 2012 issue's "Winners on Winning" feature. Bell, who incorporated a dance performance and fund-raiser into the celebration of her debut collection, is the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Eyes, Stones, released in April by Louisiana State University Press.
When we interviewed Bell for our May/June article about the unexpected rewards of winning a book prize, she mentioned that she was using some of the prize money to realize an artistic vision. "Many of the poems in the collection are persona poems, in the voices of contemporary and historical characters who are inexorably linked to the land of Israel/Palestine," she said. "Sometime during the process of creating this book, I knew that I wanted to create a performance version based on the text. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I knew it would be collaborative and somehow address the question: 'How can two narratives exist in one body?' When I found out I'd won the Whitman, I decided that rather than have a traditional book release party, I would create a performance piece with dancers and musicians addressing that question."
The piece premiered at a standing-room-only event that also included a silent art auction to benefit Just Vision, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice in Israel and Palestine. A selection from the performance is featured in the video below.
[This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article failed to mention the sponsor for the Walt Whitman Award. The prize is given annually by the Academy of American Poets.]
Three debut authors compare notes about everything from working with an editor to choosing a cover.
The trailer for Patrick Somerville's second novel, This Bright River, forthcoming in late June from Regan Arthur Books, will likely strike a chord with anyone who grew up in the pre-Internet age playing text adventures such as Zork (which also factors into the back story of one of the new novel's main characters, Ben Hanson). "I hoped that the 'user'—as well as the viewer—would be a little creeped out, but also intrigued," Somerville says. Mission accomplished.
Think back to the closet of your youth, and write an essay about what was inside. Let the contents of the closet become a metaphor for who you were as a child, who you might have wished to be, and who you have become.
Retail giant Target will stop carrying the Amazon Kindle; HBO has canceled plans to produce a series based on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; poet Jennifer Knox lists the music she'd take with her to a desert island; and more.
Write a story that begins like this: On the morning Bill Somers shot his dog, I was...
"Having been much criticized for lots of things I've talked about actually is a very liberating thing," says Joyce Maynard in this clip from Open Road Media. Maynard is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, in which she revealed her relationship with J. D. Salinger when he was fifty-three and she was eighteen.
