Remembering Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell's Letter, and More
Essayist Christopher Hitchens died last night at age sixty-two; the best independent bookstores on Twitter; great gift ideas for readers; and other news.
Stormy Weather
Kenneth Patchen's poem "A Biography of Southern Rain" is read over Billie Holiday's "Stormy Weather" in this moody video featuring some of the late poet's visual work. For more about Patchen's painted books, silk-screened broadsides, and "picture-poems," read The Written Image in the current issue.
George Whitman in Paris, Alfred Kazin's Journals, and More
George Whitman, famed American bookseller in Paris, has passed away at 98; Courtney Maum writes of what she's learned after attending over two hundred readings less than a year; the New York Observer examines the trend of agents trawling popular blogs for potential books; and other news.
Poetry Foundation Holds Book Contest for Debut Poets Over Forty
The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, supporter of emerging young poets through its Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, has announced that it will once again administer the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, an occasional prize for unpublished poets of at least forty years of age.
The competition, which awards ten thousand dollars and book publication, is open to American poets who have not published a full-length collection of verse.
Graywolf Press will publish the winning manuscript, which must be forty-eight to eighty pages long and never before submitted for this particular prize. The Minneapolis-based indie also published the two previous winners' collections, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 by the late Landis Everson and The King's Question by Brian Culhane.
The Poetry Foundation will begin accepting entries on January 16, and the competition will close on February 17. The winning poet will be notified before the close of National Poetry Month on April 30.
For complete guidelines, visit the contest web page.
December 15
Write a story that opens with your main character doing something that is completely antithetical to his or her personality. Let the story be about how this character came to do what he or she did.
Letterpress Ampersand
A letterpress print by Richard Ardagh takes shape at New North Press in this short stop-frame video. For more examples of the punctuation mark in its many forms of contemporary usage, view Ampersands in the World. And read "Poets & Ampersands" by Kevin Nance in the current issue.
Centuries-Old Poem Discovered, Sabina Murray on the Women of Franzen and Eugenides, and More
Novelist Sabina Murray writes about the female characters in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom; a centuries-old mystery was uncovered at West Virginia University—a love poem found pasted inside a 1561 edition of Chaucer; twenty-five things writers should know about rejection; and other news.
Alvin Ailey's "Revelations"
Hubert Selby Jr.
"He was so old-school he kicked dope strapped down in jail in West Hollywood," says author Jerry Stahl, who joins Henry Rollins and Amiri Baraka in this profile of the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream, The Demon, and The Room, now available as e-books from Open Road Media.
Amazon and Penguin Announce Fifth Annual Breakthrough Novel Contest
Once again in 2012 Amazon will partner with Penguin Group to hold a contest for early-career novelists.
The two media giants announced last week that the fifth annual Breakthrough Novel Award competition, which offers an advance of fifteen thousand dollars and a publication contract with Penguin, will open on January 23 and close to entries on February 5—or once five thousand entries have been submitted in the general fiction category (a young adult competition is being offered as well).
The assessment process for the contest is five-tiered. First, Amazon editors will select one thousand manuscripts from the total pool, and, with the assistance of seasoned Amazon reviewers, will whittle that group down to two hundred fifty. Those that make the cut will be reviewed and rated by Publishers Weekly reviewers, and the most favored fifty will be handed off to editors at Penguin, who will select three finalists.
The shortlisted writers will have their manuscripts reviewed by a panel that includes editor Anne Sowards, literary agent Donald Maass, and thriller author Linda Fairstein, and Amazon users will then be able to vote for a winner based on the reviews and manuscript excerpts. Amazon will reveal the winner on June 16.
For contest guidelines and the fine print, visit the Amazon website.
Pages
