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Ron Silliman contemplates the end of his eight-year poetry blog; a fake Rahm Emanuel lands a book deal; the PEN World Voices Festival all-star lineup is announced; the role of poetry in the Taliban's war strategy; and other news.
Politics and Prose bookstore finds a buyer; literature's crises (and rallies) through the ages; Elizabeth Bennett may have listened to indie rock; Borders plans to pay bonuses; and other news.
The movie Poetry, which was written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-Dong, recently won the Regard d'Or Award at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland. The movie, about a woman in her sixties who decides to take a poetry class at an adult-education center, also took honors for best screenplay at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Zone 3 Press, housed at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, is accepting entries for a new book competition "open to anyone who can carve an artful exposition, drive a factual narrative, or strum a lyric sentence." One creative nonfiction manuscript will be selected for publication by the press, and the winning writer will receive one thousand dollars.
The judge is Baltimore poet and essayist Lia Purpura, author of the prose collections Increase (University of Georgia Press, 2000), On Looking (Sarabande Books, 2006), and Rough Likeness, which is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2012. Her poetry collections include The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996) and King Baby (Alice James Books, 2008).
Eligible manuscripts should be 150 to 300 pages, and writers are encouraged to submit works that "embrace creative nonfiction’s potential by combining lyric exposition, researched reflection, travel dialogues, or creative criticism." The entry deadline is May 1. Complete deadlines can be found on the press's Web site.
In the video below, Purpura, whose prose works have been referred to as "lyric essays," reads from her latest collection of poetry.
The trouble with digitizing line breaks; dissecting the O: The Oprah Magazine poet fashion spread; Amanda Hocking strikes again; the iPad 2 sells out around the world; and other news.
On April 15 Little, Brown will publish The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's final, unfinished novel. In this BBC documentary, Geoff Ward discusses the life and works of the author who committed suicide in 2008, at the age of forty-six. Ward also talks to Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch, about the difficult task of assembling Wallace's final fragments into The Pale King.
Spend a few moments examining an old photograph—a found image, a photo from childhood, an iconic shot from history—and give it a title. Then put the photo aside and write a poem using this title.
The Japanese publishing industry is weathering the recent disasters and pitching in with relief efforts; Powell's Books releases a mobile app; Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned ninety-two yesterday; Amanda Hocking signs a four-book deal with St. Martin's; and other news.
In this clip Daniel Pogue adds stop-motion sewing animation to section 22 of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind." Ferlinghetti turned ninety-two on Thursday.
The Vilcek Foundation has selected poet Charles Simic and fiction writer Dinaw Mengestu as recipients of the sixth annual Vilcek Prizes honoring foreign-born writers, artists, and scientists now living in the United States. Former U.S. poet laureate and recent Robert Frost Medal–winner Simic, born in the former Yugoslavia, received the one-hundred-thousand-dollar prize for lifetime achievement, and Mengestu, born in Ethiopia, won the twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize for creative promise.
Author of twenty poetry collections, Simic's most recent work is Master of Disguises (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Mengestu is the author of the novels How to Read the Air (Riverhead Books, 2010) and the widely praised The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books, 2007), which won the Guardian First Book Award.
The finalists for the prize for emerging writers, each receiving five thousand dollars, are poet Ilya Kaminsky (born in the former Soviet Union) and fiction writers Simon Van Booy (born in England), Téa Obreht (born in Croatia), and Vu Tran (born in Vietnam).
The literature honorees will participate in a panel, The New Vernacular: Immigrant Authors in American Literature, at New York City's Housing Works Bookstore Café on April 5. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are appreciated.
In the video below, Mengestu discusses his latest novel.
