Jump to navigation Skip to content
Based on the 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly and directed by Lynne Ramsay, will open in theaters in France next month, in the U.K. in October, and in the U.S. in December.
Californians have launched a boycott of Amazon over its sales tax stance; Novelist Tom Perrota is the latest literary star to ink a deal with HBO; David Sedaris is not running for president of the United States; and other news.
In response to the "I Hate Reading" Facebook page (which is "liked" by nearly half a million people), Lindsay Thompson, an account manager at AbeBooks, created this brief appreciation of books. And if you find this inspiring, check out one of several (sadly less popular) "I Love Reading" pages that have popped up on Facebook.
Washington, D.C.-based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about participating in the P&W-supported reading at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. in April 2010.
Kim Roberts's anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C., brought D.C. poets together at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. on a sunny April Sunday in 2010.
As soon as I arrived, I began reading a poem for Mississippi Avenue. The poem is about a couple of kids I once knew. They would play what we use to call throwback. Throwback is a game in which players would toss a football (or any ball) into a crowd of people, and then begin chasing the person who caught it. If the ball is memory, then the boys doing the chasing are hungry to remember. Full Moon on K Street is a little like that: memories we toss into crowds, then chase down.
Just as good as the reading was Roberts's welcome. She relived the history of the project and the tidbits of D.C. history that can be found within the book as an accompaniment to the poems. Full Moon on K Street is history and poetry. Truth is, Roberts's anthology is about making memories live in the present...that’s what the reading was about too.
Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
I had applied only to programs that offered funding, but once spring rolled around and I spoke with students at Brooklyn College and elsewhere, I discovered I had some other strong priorities: camaraderie rather than competition, one-on-one support from faculty, and instruction on craft and technique. I was working overseas and I was actually reluctant to return to New York, but a flurry of e-mails with current MFA candidates ultimately made it an easy choice. The Brooklyn College students I spoke with were unanimously—and compellingly—enthusiastic about their experience.
The future of books considered; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective is banned from a Virginia classroom; Best New Poets anthology released; and other news.
When I was applying to MFA programs, I was very interested in location. Classes and school-related activities only take up a limited amount of time; I wanted to be somewhere I felt comfortable living and writing. When it came time to choose between programs, I began to consider everything else—commitment of the faculty, program size, affordability/financial support, and sense of community. Brooklyn College ranked high on all of these marks. The teachers are genuinely excited to support new writers and will gladly read and discuss work outside of workshop.
Transcribe five sentences that you find interesting from a book or a magazine or newspaper article. Send the first half of each to a friend via e-mail and ask him or her to finish the sentence and send it back to you. Use the responses, or portions of them, as the beginnings of poem.
The official pub date for Justin Torres's We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is September 1, but already the debut novel is racking up superlatives typically reserved for more established authors. Michael Cunningham calls it "heartbreaking" and "beautiful." Paul Harding calls it "an indelible and essential work of art." And Benjamin Percy, in the current issue of Esquire, calls it "a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape."
The National Book Awards, a literary institution for more than sixty years, broke through their traditional submission guidelines recently, accepting for the first time an exclusively electronic book as a nominee. According to National Book Foundation (NBF) executive director Harold Augenbraum, although the rules stipulate that eligible books must be printable on paper—and the app in question, designed for the iPad, contains features such as graphics and video—the foundation reviews its guidelines annually, and broadening them to include e-books may be a natural next step.
"I wonder whether the tablet reader will lend itself to a new phase in the type of literary abstraction," Augenbraum told book culture website inReads, noting that the nominated app "combines text, graphics, and video in a seamless story. That will have an effect on the way we read. There will be people who will only want to read text, or watch video, and then there will be combinations."
Among the other books nominated for this year's awards are 191 poetry collections, 311 novels, and 441 nonfiction books.
For more of Augenbraum's behind-the-scenes perspective on the National Book Awards, check out the full interview at inReads. And stay tuned this fall as the NBF whittles down its list of nominees; the finalists for the ten-thousand-dollar prizes will be announced on October 12.
