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Open a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a book from your bookshelves to any page; choose a word, and write it down. Repeat this nine times. Write a poem with ten couplets (they need not rhyme) using one of the words from your list in each couplet, without using the first person.
Critic David Ulin has a look at the just published first novel of Jack Kerouac; Roxane Gay discusses race, and the killing of Trayvon Martin; Steve Almond imagines it may not be a coincidence that psychotherapy is waning while writing programs are booming; and other news.
"Variety may be the spice of life, but brevity is its bread and butter," says Terin Izil as she explains why simple, punchy language is often the clearest way to convey a message in this fun, two-minute video animated by Sunni Brown.
RosettaBooks today released the Kindle Single Basic Training, a previously unpublished novella by Kurt Vonnegut; Agent Jonny Geller offers a manifesto for the evolving book world; Author Elissa Schappell profiles the debut book of poetry by Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, an Index; and other news.
Be careful or you just might learn a thing or two from this fun animated video from the Open University. The entire history of the English language in ten minutes. Ready. Set. Go.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg explains how she's the poet laureate both of Kansas and of limbo; in response to a school ban of ethnic studies, writers and activists delivered an "underground library" to Arizona; federal authorities intercepted eleven pounds of marijuana in transit to St. Martin's Press; and other news.
Last night Steven Millhauser took the Story Prize, the annual award celebrating a short story collection published in the previous year, at a ceremony in New York City. Following readings by the author, who began his career as a novelist (a Pulitzer Prize–winning one, at that), and his fellow finalists, Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman, Millhauser's We Others (Knopf) was announced as the selection for this year's twenty-thousand-dollar award.
Millhauser, who admits influences ranging from Dr. Seuss's And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street to makers, inventors, and craftsman (including those ne'er-do-wells of his youth who revealed their secret, and unmatched, talents in woodshop), was recognized for his skill at pushing the boundaries of the imaginative process. As prize director Larry Dark noted in his onstage interview with the author, one uniting feature of Millhauser's oeuvre is the "escalation of efforts" exemplified in stories such as "Snowmen," which the author presented last night. Millhauser followed the story with a reading of a "thingamajig," which he asked the audience to regard as such, avoiding classifying the two-minute lyric romp as a "poem" or "story."
Both DeLillo, shortlisted for The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner), and Pearlman, a finalist for Binocular Vision (Lookout Books), took home five thousand dollars each. The judges for this year's award were author Sherman Alexie, translator Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman of the Los Angeles Public Library.
After the prizes were presented (and the authors swamped with readers seeking autographs), the evening wound down with a party for the finalists, an intimate celebration in a Greenwich Village restaurant befitting the tiny beauty of, as DeLillo put it, "the classic American form."
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams delivered the Poetry Society's annual lecture at Newcastle University in the UK last summer. The seventy-five-year-old chose as his topic On Being Old, reading poems that explore his changing relationship with the great poets of history.
