Jump to navigation Skip to content
In case you missed it, here's the trailer for Liz Moore's second novel, Heft, the story of the unlikely connection between a former academic, Arthur Opp, who weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade, and seventeen-year-old Kel Keller, a poor kid in a rich school who pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career. Heft was published in January by Norton.
The United States Justice Department intends to sue Apple and five of the largest publishers; WNYC features Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection Lunch Poems; the staff blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the work of Víctor Terán, a poet attempting to save his endangered Isthmus Zapotec language; and other news.
Actor Dave Foley (The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio) reads "Suck It," a poem from Suzanne Weber's To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born: Revenge Poems for Babies and Toddlers, forthcoming from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April.
In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking, 2005), Rebecca Solnit discusses the importance of allowing yourself to get lost—both in life and in writing—in order to become more fully conscious. The art of getting lost, she says, "is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss." Write about a time when you got lost—physically, emotionally, spiritually, or otherwise—and how getting lost, and perhaps embracing that loss, resulted in something new being found.
To mark the birthday of John Updike, Random House will reissue some of the author's books, and make Updike's entire backlist available as e-books; Richard Russo and Andre Dubus III discuss the difficulties of writing memoir, an audio walking tour of poetry associated with New York City's East Village neighborhood has been created, narrated by Jim Jarmusch; and other news.
Fill in the generalities with details and use the following to begin a scene for a story: CHARACTER NAME sits at his/her desk in his/her office above Guiliani's Pizza on STREET NAME in CITY NAME. He/she leans down and removes his/her shoes, placing them neatly by the bookcase, then picks up the phone.
The author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, who is profiled in the current issue, describes her three-month, eleven-hundred-mile hike in this new video from Knopf.
Evan Hughes writes of the friendship between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, and the betrayal that resulted in an award-winning novel; the Guardian examines the growing popularity of erotica among women writers; author Darin Strauss weighs The Sopranos against Six Feet Under; and other news.
During the next week collect images, photographs, small objects, lines of poetry that you've written, passages from other writers' work, snippets of conversations you overhear. Throughout the week put these things in a shoe box or something similar. At the end of the week, sit down and lay out each thing around you. Use the things you've collected as the ingredients for a poem.
Her Majesty's Secret Players present "Pulp Shakespeare," an Elizabethan take on Quentin Tarantino's 1994 movie, now playing at Theatre Asylum on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
