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A closer look at Amazon Publishing's numbers; Elizabeth Bishop was also a painter, and a book of her visual art has been published; Salmon Rushdie weighs in on Kim Kardashian; and other news.
Inspired by Herman Melville's masterpiece, Ohio artist Matt Kish crafted an original piece of art for each page of Moby-Dick. The resulting collection was published in October by Tin House Books. Take a closer look at Kish's work in this issue's installment of The Written Image as well as the related slideshow, which features eleven images from Moby-Dick in Pictures.
Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher and free-speech activist, has been imprisoned by the Turkish government; Novelist Hisham Matar will return to Libya to find his father, long imprisoned by the Qaddafi regime; how to save thousands of dollars on rare books; and other news.
L. S. Klatt reads a poem from Cloud of Ink (University of Iowa Press, 2011) in this short film by Tom Jacobsen. Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009, was a visual artist best known for his painting "Christina's World," an image of which appears in the clip.
Celebrating the kickoff of National Novel Writing Month, the website HubPages, a sort of micro-blogging community, is holding a no-fee writing contest—for poets as well as fiction writers. Prizes of five hundred dollars, one hundred dollars, and fifty dollars will be given to writers in both genres, and one overall winner will be offered publication of a poetry or story collection via self-publishing outfit Smashwords (though editing of the manuscript is not part of the prize).
Writers are invited to create a HubPages login and then publish the works they wish to enter as "hubs," or short posts that are housed on the website under a variety of topic headings: poems and poetry, creative writing, and so on. Every post must be accompanied by a photo (a separate photo competition is also being held in conjunction with the writing contests).
The winners, to be announced on December 2, will be selected by judging panels made up of staff members and HubPages users pulled from the more than two-hundred-thousand registered with the site. Entries may be posted (with the tag "contest") until November 22.
Complete guidelines, including links to the profiles of each panelist, are available on the Hub Patron of the Arts web page.
Today marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month; New Hampshire's RiverRun Bookstore is in danger of closing; Pauline Kael's rivalry with Joan Didion; and other news.
In Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, published last month by Harper Perennial, Blake Butler uses scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King to explore the tension between sleeping and conscious life. This bizarre trailer, directed by Drew Mobley, evokes Butler's own 129-hour bout of insomnia described in the book.
While other social networking sites are useful for playful community-building, LinkedIn provides a place for professional writers to focus on sincerity when creating connections.
