The Snow Child
In Eowyn Ivey's debut novel, set in Alaska in 1920, a couple's lives are changed forever by the arrival of a little girl on their snowy doorstep.
December 26
Write a poem that is an elegy for something or someone you've had to let go of this year.
Go the F**k to Sleep
Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple, author Adam Mansbach, and illustrator Ricardo Cortés talk about the genesis of the best-selling book Go the F**k to Sleep in this video from Open Road Integrated Media. For more of the inside story, including the long-term impact of such success on Akashic, read "Glass-Slipper Economics: Cinderella Stories in Indie Publishing" in the current issue.
Fiction App Hosts Story Contest
One-year-old literary app Storyville, which offers subscribers digital deliveries of new and archival stories, is holding its first one-thousand-dollar prize competition.
The winner of the Sidney Prize, named for New Orleans politician Sidney Story—the app's namesake—will be published on the app, which is currently available on iPad, iPhone, and Kindle.
Selecting the winning story will be publishing innovator Richard Nash, former helmsman of Soft Skull Press who recently founded indie publishing platform Cursor and the literary prose imprint Red Lemonade.
For a $4.99 entry fee, the cost of a half-year subscription to the app, writers may submit a story of up to five thousand words (for current subscribers, there's no fee). The deadline is February 15.
For contest guidelines, and to sample the Storyville community's short fiction predilections via "top-ten" lists by authors such as Josip Novakovich and Emma Straub, visit the Storyville website.
Mark Doty on Handel's "Messiah"
During a recent appearance on the PBS NewsHour, National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty spoke about one of the great traditions of the holiday season: Handel's "Messiah."
Ampersand Wedding Cake
A wedding cake decorated with, naturally, ampersands.
Wimpy Kid Lawsuit, "I Hate Jonathan Safran Foer," and More
Jeff Kinney, the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, is suing Antarctic Press over its publication of a book titled Diary of a Zombie Kid; Seamus Heaney has donated his literary archive to the National Library of Ireland; Novelist Kate Christensen has launched a food blog; and other news.
Ampersand in Title
A book cover image sent to us by a Poets & Writers Magazine reader.
Chris Cleave
"People think I'm a writer of these very sad stories. Well, I wanted to write about something that was joyful and I wanted to write about how much people will sacrifice of their ambition in order to care for the people they love," says Chris Cleave, the best-selling author of Little Bee (2009), about his next novel, Gold, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster next summer.
December 22
Choose a place from your childhood—the house your grew up in, your grandparents' home, or another place you visited often—and draw a map of it, with as much detail as possible. Let the map ignite your memory about what happened in this place and who was there. Write a scene for a story based on a fictionalized account of one of your memories, using this place as the setting and your map as source of description.
Pages
