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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.
"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.
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.
Author Richard Russo weighs in on Amazon's new Price Check app; Bill Clinton helped an independent bookstore have one of its biggest one-day sales in recent history; novelist Vanessa Veselka writes of her attempts to unionize her co-workers; and other news.
Director Marilyn Zornado presents an evening with the Insect Literary Society in this animated film featuring poems (read by Mr Spider, Mr. Dragonfly, Ms. Firefly, and Ms. Moth) from Inside the Rainbow Garden by Meme Marie Meyers, a poet from Portland, Oregon, who passed away last Tuesday.
The future of poet Carl Sandburg's boyhood home is uncertain; ICM talent agency is in the process of a major restucturing; why television is supplanting film as the ideal venue for literary adaptions; and other news.
Look back through the poems you've written this year and make a list of images or words you've repeated. This list will guide you toward identifying your poetic obsessions. Choose one of your poetic obsessions and write a poem that fully explores it.
The 2012 season of Motionpoems, produced in partnership with Best American Poetry 2011, starts with Scott Wenner's adaption of David Lehman's poem "French Movie."
