Yes Yes
Lukas Fiala and Nicole Schmitt recently partnered to create this animated look at Charles Bukowski's rather ecstatic poem, which appears in Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Ecco, 2002).
Kurt Vonnegut's Story Grids, Labor Dispute at the Strand, and More
GalleyCat features a helpful writing tool Kurt Vonnegut used; the famed Strand bookstore in New York City is in the midst of a labor dispute with its employees; an Italian human rights group insists Dante's Divine Comedy is offensive and should be removed from schools; and other news.
A. J. Jacobs
At one of last year's TED conferences, writer A. J. Jacobs spoke about his long, three-tiered self-improvement project that has resulted in three books, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), The Year of Biblical Thinking: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), and Drop-Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).
Five Young Literary Lions Contend for 2012 Prize
The New York Public Library has announced the five finalists for its twelfth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, given to an emerging writer for a work published in in the previous year. The winner of the honor, which carries a prize of ten thousand dollars, will be announced on May 14.
The 2012 finalists are Teju Cole for Open City (Random House), Benjamin Hale for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve), Ben Lerner for Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press), Karen Russell for Swamplandia! (Knopf), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury). Salvage the Bones, Ward's second novel after her breakout, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Publishing, 2008), won the National Book Award in fiction last fall. Cole's debut was a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle Award.
Recent winners of the NYPL's top honor for emerging writers are Adam Levin for The Instructions (McSweeney's Books, 2010), Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and Salvatore Scibona for The End (Graywolf Press, 2008). The award is an program of the library's Young Lions, a group of donors in their twenties and thirties.
In the video below, finalist Teju Cole presents "a sneak peak" into his nascent nonfiction project at Franklin Park bar in Brooklyn, New York.
Novelist Sues Fox, John Barr Retires, and More
Matthew Yglesias discusses the Justice Department's planned antitrust lawsuit concerning the price of e-books; Barry Eisler comes to Amazon's defense; A writer, Everette Hallford, is suing Fox, claiming the new television series Touch is based on his novel Visionary; and other news.
This Morning
"All the things / I hoped would go away this morning. / The stuff I live with every day. What / I've trampled on in order to stay alive." Raymond Carver's poem is read by Alessio Morglia and illustrated and animated by Alessandro Ferraro in this short video.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Says Goodbye to Print, Reasons to Stop Writing, and More
After over two centuries, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will no longer be printed; the Wall Street Journal reports that e-readers are fueling a boom in sales of erotic novels; critic Dwight Garner looks at the life and poetry of Jack Gilbert; and other news.
Katherine Larson
"You have speakers engaged with everything from the purple gonads of moon jellyfish to ancient Egyptian burial rights," says poet and molecular biologist Katherine Larson about her collection Radial Symmetry, winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets, in this recent profile on the PBS NewsHour.
Fictionalize the Famous
Choose an article from a magazine that profiles a person, such as a celebrity, a political figure, or a professional athlete. Using one of the settings in the article and a fictionalized version of the person as the main character, write a story in which it is revealed that the main character's greatest strength is also his or her greatest failing.
The Wanderer
Travel writer, memoirist, and novelist Mary Morris, who teaches a workshop called The Writer and the Wanderer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, likes to send her students on field trips to light the creative torch. “I like to get my students out of the house, and a little out of their heads,” says Morris, whose most recent book is the memoir River Queen (Holt, 2007). “Go away. Listen. Eavesdrop. Find something new. Bring back a souvenir. What do you take with you? What do you leave behind? Sit outside in one place until a story comes to you.” Follow Morris's guidance: Go on a field trip of your own, and discover the wanderer within you.
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