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With work on their minds this Labor Day weekend (when many of us are taking three days off), the fine folks at Open Road Media take a look at how several writers, including Andres Dubus and Don Winslow, paid the bills while they were struggling to make it in the literary world.
Joining the ranks of Herman Hesse and Sigmund Freud, Syrian-born poet Adonis is the first Arabic-speaking writer to win the triennial Goethe Prize for literature. The eighty-one-year-old poet, whose Selected Poems in a translation by Khaled Mattawa (Yale University Press, 2010) recently won the 2011 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, received fifty thousand euros at a ceremony last Sunday, Goethe's birthday. (The prize is worth approximately $71,365.)
Goethe himself introduced aspects of Arabic literature to European readers—inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz, Goethe published the poetry collection West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) in 1819. In a reversal, according to the prize judges, "Adonis has carried the accomplishments of European modernity into Arabic cultural circles, with great effect."
"I wanted to draw on Arab tradition and mythology without being tied to it," said Adonis of his process in an interview with the New York Times (via the Guardian). "I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text—to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought."
Adonis, who adopted his pen name at the age of nineteen (he was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber), is the author of more than twenty books of poetry including Mihyar of Damascus (BOA Editions, 2008), A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse University Press, 2004), and If Only the Sea Could Sleep (Green Integer, 2002).
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Christopher Fritton of the Western New York Book Arts Center demonstrates the process of creating part of a book for the artist Richard Tuttle.
We’ve compiled this annual guide to graduate creative writing programs—which includes our rankings of the top full- and low-residency MFA programs (with honorable mentions) and, new to this year, doctoral programs—to provide a spark for the deep thinking and serious consideration that the process of choosing a program requires.
Answers to the most commonly asked questions about our rankings of full-residency, low-residency, and doctoral programs in creative writing.
Directors, coordinators, and professors of full- and low-residency MFA programs offer some advice for prospective students trying to decide which programs are right for them.
Libyan bookseller reopens shop after revolt; Kashmir's literary festival is canceled; Goethe Prize goes to Syrian poet; Ann Patchett on making the writer's life; and other news.
Earlier this month Random House published the paperback edition of Let's Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell's memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story (The Dial Press, 1996), who died of lung cancer at age forty-two in 2002.
A number of bookstores on the East Coast were hit hard by Hurricane Irene; a group of novelists imagine Moammar Gadhafi's current state of mind; media critic Jack Shafter advises journalists to "always be looking for your next gig"; and other news.
