Jump to navigation Skip to content
Last week Hachette Digital released David’s Diary, a new smartphone app that features six animated short films inspired by David Sedaris’s diary. The app costs $1.99, but here's one of the videos for free. Enjoy. Virgin Sour Toe Cocktail anyone?
Poetry and art world icon John Ashbery will be honored in November with the National Book Foundation's twenty-first Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The eighty-four-year-old author of Notes From the Air (Ecco, 2007), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975), Some Trees (Yale University Press, 1956), and dozens of other volumes of poetry and prose will receive the award along with the winners of this year's National Book Awards at the foundation's annual dinner on November 16.
Also recognized will be Mitchell Kaplan, one of the founders of the twenty-seven-year-old Miami Book Fair International and a former president of the American Booksellers Association. Kaplan will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, previously awarded to advocates of the written word such as Dave Eggers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Terry Gross.
The foundation will announce its finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards on October 12 at Portland's Literary Arts Center, with Oregon Public Radio broadcasting the event locally and online. The winning authors will be revealed on the night of the benefit dinner.
In the video below, Ashbery, who in 2008 won the international Griffin Poetry Prize (sponsored by the Canadian organization the Griffin Trust), reads "Interesting People of Newfoundland" from Notes From the Air.
A California group attempts to repeal a law that allows students to learn about Walt Whitman; Ugandan police arrest writer Vincent Nzaramba; previously banned Slaughterhouse-Five is restored to Missouri school library; and other news.
In this collection of essays, poet Stanley Plumly meditates on poetry and art, especially the impulses, occasions, and places out of which art arises and the forms by which imagination gives it shape.
Read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Wells Towers’s story “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” Both stories integrate the ancient and the contemporary in surprising and disturbing ways. (For another example read Matthew Sharpe’s novel Jamestown [Soft Skull Press, 2007]). Draft a story that does the same thing, blending the past and the present into the fictional elements of plot, setting, dialogue, and character.
"I think the funnest part of running a bookstore is treasure hunting...going through those boxes and coming up with hidden treasures," says Jeffrey Frase, owner of Cameron's Books, the second-oldest used-book store in Portland, Oregon. "It's just like being a kid again." Directors Jin Ryu and Yi-Fan Lu spent two months getting to know Frase before asking if they could film this five-minute documentary.
A Pennsylvania school closes production of the musical Kismet; Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez's 1996 book, News of a Kidnapping, sells out in Tehran; Eudora Welty's Mississippi garden; and other news.
Editors, designers, and other members of the Penguin team talk about their favorite fonts in this promotional video for Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield, published this month by Penguin imprint Gotham Books. Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Helvetica, Garamond? What does your favorite font say about you?
The last remaining Borders closes its doors forever, and former employees leave an epitaph; the Phantom Tollbooth at fifty; Harlan Ellison sues to halt the release of a new film starring Justin Timberlake; and other news.
This year's MacArthur Foundation Fellows, commonly referred to as recipients of the organization's "Genius" grant, have been announced. Among a class of fellows that includes a virologist, a cellist, an architect, a lawyer for elder rights, an evolutionary geneticist, and a silversmith, poet Kay Ryan is honored for her "deceptively simple verse of wisdom and elegance."
Ryan, who from 2008 to 2009 served as the sixteenth U.S. poet laureate, will receive the five-hundred-thousand-dollar prize, designed to encourage continued work, but with "no strings attached," over the next five years. Author of seven collections, she was honored earlier this year with the Pulitzer Prize for her latest book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010).
Translator and poet A. E. Stallings, whose work is influenced by her training in classical Greek and Latin, also received the fellowship. Currently living in Athens, Stallings is recognized for "revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity's relevance for today." Aside from her translations of Plutarch, Lucretius, and other classical writers, her original works include Hapax (2006) and Archaic Smile (1999). A new poetry collection, Olives, is forthcoming in 2012 from TriQuarterly Books.
For biographies of and interviews with the 2011 fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to sixty-seven and represent ten states, plus Washington, D.C., Greece, and British Columbia, visit the MacArthur website.
In the video below, Ryan describes the impact of the MacArthur grant, especially for a writer at sixty-five, and where she is in her work, "always just beginning."
