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J.A. Konrath announced his e-books alone garnered $100,000 in three weeks; GalleyCat offers a reading list to supplement your viewing of Downton Abbey; the New York Times reviews An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the ____ You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side by musician and poet Ed Sanders; and other news.
“I found Carol Shields’s Unless (Fourth Estate, 2002) at our local Friends of the Library used-book sale fund-raiser. I recognized Shields as the author of a novel I had really enjoyed back in the early nineties—The Stone Diaries (Viking, 1993). I knew anything written by her would be a treasure and I was not disappointed. A rush of storytelling, like a wave crashing upon an empty beach at dawn, suddenly the reader is pulled under and moving with the tide.
Alberto Chimal of Mexico City reads his story "Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" from Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, published this month by Small Beer Press.
HarperCollins is launching a program today to sell thousands of backlist titles via print-on-demand technology at independent bookstores; Fast Company reports on the discovery of numerous plagiarized e-books in Amazon's Kindle Store; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton wrote a heartrending letter to her teenage daughter, Linda, intended to be reread in the future; and other news.
“After a year of reading books that ranged from the all-time classics to the recently acclaimed, I was surprised to realize that the best book I read in 2011 was Adam Langer's The Thieves of Manhattan (Spiegel & Grau, 2010), a book I was given as a gift and which I’d never heard of before. It was by no means the most intellectual or emotional book I read in the past year, but it was by far the most unique, engaging, and simply enjoyable novel I’ve read in a while.
Choose a story that you've finished or a story by another author and use the last line of it to begin a new story, using the same characters and/or introducing new ones.
"The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the writing life: space. I just think of space. Time to daydream. Time to notice things," says Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 1986), Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (Bantam, 1990), and other books on writing.
The Millions takes a close look at the essays of John Updike; Tilda Swinton writes of her discovery and fascination with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; N+1 details embattled former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno's misreading of Virgil's Aeneid; and more.
If the finalists for the latest Story Prize are any indication, 2011 was a golden year for the short fiction form. Announced this morning, the authors up for the annual twenty-thousand-dollar award, given for a short story collection published in the previous year, are three of the country's most accomplished authors: Don DeLillo, Steven Millhauser, and Edith Pearlman.
"The idea that the short story is a beginner’s form, one that novice writers cut their teeth on before turning to the more ambitious work of writing novels, is a common misconception," reads a press release issued this morning by prize director Larry Dark. "This year’s finalists for the Story Prize show that—to the contrary—top fiction writers often remain devoted to the demanding form of the short story throughout their careers."
DeLillo, author of more than a dozen novels, is shortlisted for his first story collection, The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner), and Millhauser is nominated for We Others (Knopf), which includes works from four previous collections. Pearlman, who was honored last year for her contributions to the short story tradition with a PEN/Malamud Award, is shortlisted for Binocular Vision (Lookout Books), a finalist for last year's National Book Award. (An excerpt from Pearlman's book is here.)
The winner of the Story Prize, selected by judges Sherman Alexie, translator Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman of the Los Angeles Public Library, will be announced on March 21 at a ceremony at the New School University in New York City. The public is invited to attend the event, which features readings by and interviews with each of the finalists. For more information, visit the Story Prize website.
In the video below, Pearlman reads from her shortlisted collection at the National Book Award finalists' reading event.
