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Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
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"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, 2010) by David Mitchell was a volume I purchased on a whim. I had previously read Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas (Random House) and was not very impressed by it, but the glowing review from Dave Eggers on the Thousand Autumns cover gave me a great deal of hope. I probably would have liked the book from the start if I had not read the cover copy, but burdened with this information, I found the book very hard to read initially. In fact, I stopped half way through.
Take an episode from a piece you've already written—the more personal the better—and rewrite it as a third-person news story, faithfully following the inverted-pyramid and who-what-when-where-why structure of normative journalism. This week's creative nonfiction prompt comes from Vijay Seshadri, director of the nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College and author, most recently, of The Disappearances (Harper Collins, 2007).
The owners of Type Books in Toronto spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books to produce this amazing video featuring music by Grayson Matthews.
The final seven writers up for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, the shortlist for which is typically narrowed down to only five titles, were announced earlier today. The annual thirty-thousand-dollar prize, once awarded for an unpublished manuscript, is now given for a novel written in or translated into English and authored by a citizen of one of thirty-five eligible Asian countries and territories.
Of the shortlisted titles below, selected by judges Razia Iqbal, Chag-rae Lee, and Vikas Swarup, four were written in English. The novels by authors from China, South Korea, and Japan are translations.
The Wandering Falcon (Penguin India) by Jamil Ahmad of Pakistan Rebirth (Penguin India) by Jahnavi Barua of India The Sly Company of People Who Care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Rahul Bhattacharya of India River of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Amitav Ghosh of India, who recently won the Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix Please Look After Mom (Knopf) by Kyung-sook Shin of South Korea Dream of Ding Village (Grove Atlantic) by Yan Lianke of China The Lake (Melville House) by Banana Yoshimoto of Japan
“The judges were greatly impressed by the imaginative power of the stories now being written about rapidly changing life in worlds as diverse as the arid borderlands of Pakistan, the crowded cityscape of modern Seoul, and the opium factories of nineteenth century Canton," said Iqbal in a press release. "This power and diversity made it imperative for us to expand the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist beyond the usual five books.”
The winner, who will join the ranks of writers such as Bi Feiyu (Three Sisters) and Miguel Syjuco (Ilustrado), will be announced on March 15.
In the video below, Kyung-sook Shin reads from her shortlisted novel, along with a translator, at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.
Memoirist and monologist Mike Daisey investigates the production of the Apple devices; Dwight Garner reviews spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron's posthumously published memoir; Alexander Nazaryan believes fellow critic Adam Langer is the "worst book reviewer in America;" and other news.
“Victor Shklovsky in 1916 posited that one crucial function of art is estrangement, defamiliarization or making the commonplace strange again and that's just what Alice Notley has accomplished in Culture of One (Penguin Books, 2011) by inventing the compelling voice of Marie who lives in a dump in the desert and has to construct her life with the materials found there, the detritus and ephemera becoming her book of wisdom.
"My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light," writes Jack Gilbert in his poem "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." His Collected Poems will be published by Knopf in March.
Nine Chinese authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, charging the technology giant with illegally selling their work; Film director Tran Anh Hung details how Haruki Murakami's helped with the screen adaptation of Norwegian Wood; publishing veteran Jonathan Galassi discusses the state of contemporary poetry; and other news.
