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Choose a social-media Web site, and click on the profile of a person you don't know. Look at his photos, interests, and friends. Give this person a new name, and write a story about something you imagine happened to him ten years in the past, an event that altered the course of his life.
It's National Library Week; according to a new survey, 77 percent of Americans oppose censoring Mark Twain's famous novels; bitter Borders employees make hilarious signage; Brave New World tops the list of most challenged books in American libraries; and other news.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's oldest postgraduate writing program, is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. Jeffrey Brown delivered this recent report on PBS NewsHour.
Among the ten finalists for the one-hundred-thousand-dollar International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award are three American writers, the same number that hail from the librarian-driven award's home country.
Barbara Kingsolver is shortlisted for her novel The Lacuna, Yiyun Li for The Vagrants, and Joyce Carol Oates for Little Bird of Heaven, all published in 2009.
Representing Ireland (with a touch of New York City) are the novels Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, and Love and Summer by William Trevor. Also shortlisted are Michael Crummey of Canada for Galore and Australian writers David Malouf for Ransom, Craig Silvey for Jasper Jones, and Evie Wyld for After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice.
The titles were selected from a pool of 162 books nominated by librarians around the world, and for the first time since 2000, no translations appear on the shortlist (the Guardian's books blog probes the issue). The winner, selected by an international panel of writers, will be announced on June 15.
Form Line of Battle! by Alexander Kent and Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick top this piece.
The title of this piece plays with the title of the book at its crown, The Surgeon by W. C. Heinz.
The flavor of revolution at the Tahrir Book Fair in Egypt; the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada is under fire from politicians; a book you can sleep inside; China's "most severe crackdown on freedom of expression in years"; and other news.
A movie scheduled to be released in the fall presents the theory that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote all of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This trailer for Anonymous, starring Rys Ifans as Oxford and Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth I, features music by Radiohead.
Titles used in this piece include A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt and The Utmost Island by Henry Myers.
