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A judge quits over Philip Roth's Booker win; One Book, One Twitter is back; the Who's Pete Townshend will write a memoir; suped-up e-book versions of Penguin Classics; and other news.
The winner has been announced for the fourth biennial Man Booker International Prize, which carries a purse of sixty thousand pounds. For American Philip Roth, who was honored for his lifetime contributions to fiction, that translates to roughly ninety-seven thousand dollars.
Roth's oeuvre—from Goodbye, Columbus (Houghton Mifflin, 1959) to Nemesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)—has "stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience," said chair of judges Rick Gekoski. "His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally."
A three-time finalist for the international award, Roth was joined on this year's shortlist by U.K. authors John le Carré (whose request to be removed from the shortlist was unsuccessful) and Philip Pullman, Australian David Malouf, Chinese author Su Tong, and Americans Marilynne Robinson and Anne Tyler. Past winners of the prize include Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Ismail Kadare of Albania, and Alice Munro of Canada.
In the video below, Roth talks about beginning a novel and the years-long process of working on one, and why he doesn't worry about the reader.
Next month Harper will publish Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, in which Carmela Ciuraru tells the stories of more than a dozen pseudonymous authors, including Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot, and explores the creative process and "the darker, often crippling aspects of fame."
Arabic and Kurdish writers share a stage in northern Iraq; how Hollywood decides which books to adapt into films; the AARP launches a publishing imprint; the New York Public Library launches an iPad app; and other news.
The anime art film Spring & Chaos, directed by Shoji Kawamori and created exclusively for Japanese television, is based on the life of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, who died in 1933. The hour-long film can be seen in its entirety at Hulu.com.
For the next few weeks Camille Rankine, program and communications coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation, will give us the rundown on the longtime P&W-supported literary organization.
Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady founded Cave Canem in 1996 with the intuition that African American poets would benefit from having a place of their own in the literary landscape. That summer, twenty-six poets gathered at Mount St. Alphonsus Conference Center in Esopus, New York. “The first night when everyone sat in a circle and started breaking down about how they had never felt safe and never studied with an African American poet, you could see something had really happened,” Toi Derricotte recalled. “People broke open,” said Cornelius Eady, describing the first workshop in an interview for the Poetry Foundation. “And then everyone hung out by the river and built a fire and really claimed the space.”
In the fifteen years since its founding, Cave Canem’s community has grown to become an influential movement with a renowned faculty and high-achieving national fellowship of over three hundred, many of whom have been P&W-supported and/or listed in the Directory of Poets & Writers. From inception, the organization’s week-long writing retreat has provided sustenance and a safe space to take artistic chances.
This June, the tradition will continue at the sixteenth annual summer retreat, held at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg in Pennsylvania. Here, fifty-four fellows will commune with their peers and study with world-class poets Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Terrance Hayes, Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine, and Natasha Trethewey. As Harryette Mullen, recipient of P&W's fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize, put it, in this environment “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness."
In addition to the retreat, several public readings, including a tented event at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh on June 23, will showcase the work of fellows, faculty, and visiting poet Amiri Baraka.
Photo: Cave Canem Founders, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs gets another obscenity trial; a Tower of Babel made of books in Argentina; a record label for poets; what your literary tote bag says about you; and other news.
Compose a poem collaboratively with a friend. Write one line and send it to your friend via e-mail, or by passing a notebook back and forth, and invite your friend to write the next line, building on what you wrote. Continue composing the poem together, line by line, until you have at least twenty lines. Then each of you consider the draft and revise it independently. Compare your final versions.
Our slender torsos danced under the starry summer sky.
I remember the warmth of your caress, the wine of every kiss.
Pressed between the love letters of long, long ago
are the beautiful rose petals. They still glow.
Soaring as rockets trapped in ascent
reaching toward the heavens.
Anchored in earth which by a miracle
holds them tightly to her bosom.
Mighty sentinels majestically stand.
Yet neither threat nor cannon here assemble.
Silence permeates and we are entranced
while standing in the confines of the ancients.
As in a house of prayer the need arises
to softly whisper in this enchanted cathedral.
May you be here eternally, my friends,
to nurture lost souls and humble the eagles.
