Jump to navigation Skip to content
Stieg Larsson's partner may finish writing the author's uncompleted last novel; Neil Gaiman will appear on an episode of The Simpsons; Las Vegas reckons with being the country's fifty-second most literate city; the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers; and other news.
The nation's third poetry-only bookstore opens in Boulder, Colorado; new (and old) California Governor Jerry Brown proposes cutting the state's entire public library budget; an ancient letters app from the British Library; a European Commission report warns of a possible "digital Dark Age"; and other news.
Choose three people who you know well and write a detailed character description of each one. Now change the gender, name, and a few physical traits of each one. Begin a story with all three characters standing in the rain outside of a house on fire.
Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.
The keepers of Robert Frost's family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where the poet lived from 1900 to 1911, have opened their inaugural formal poetry contest. Sponsored by the trustees of the Robert Frost Farm and the Hyla Brook Poets, a workshop group that holds a reading series at the historic site, the competition is calling for poems written in meter—any metrical form is welcome.
One winner will receive one thousand dollars and an invitation to read in the Hyla Brook series at the Frost Farm, a program that has hosted poets such as Maxine Kumin, Rhina Espaillat, and Wesley McNair. Serving as judge will be William Baer, former editor of the no-longer-published poetry journal the Formalist.
The entry fee is five dollars a poem, and writers may submit as many works as they like—via snail mail—by April 1. Complete guidelines are posted on the Robert Frost Farm Web site.
In the video below, a short film by Doug Williams interprets Frost's poem "Into My Own," originally published as "Into Mine Own" in New England Magazine during the time Frost lived at the Derry farm, in 1909.
The Salinger estate settles with a Swedish author; door-to-door bookselling in Brazil; an iPad book app for three-month-old babies; Borders announces the impending closure of its Tennessee distribution center; and other news.
The folks at McSweeney's Quarterly Concern put together this audio-visual preview of their thirty-sixth issue, which was published last month and features more than five hundred pages of stories and artwork contained in a box more or less the size of a human head.
Two history teachers from Honolulu, Hawaii, have spent the past year or so creating a series of videos that use tailored versions of popular songs to deliver history lessons. Here is a bit about The Canterbury Tales set to "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas. Check out the historyteachers channel on YouTube for dozens more.
The Story Prize announced today the shortlist for its seventh annual award, an honor worth twenty thousand dollars. The finalists are Anthony Doerr for his fourth book, Memory Wall (Scribner); Yiyun Li for her third book, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House); and Suzanne Rivecca for her debut, Death Is Not an Option (Norton), all of whom have received support from multiple sources that has bolstered their writing.
Doerr, author of the short story collection The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, is a recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also received the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award in 2003 for The Shell Collector.
Li, who received the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship last September, is also recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. From abroad, she has been recognized by the Munster Literature Centre with its Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and by the Guardian, with its First Book Award, for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. She is also the author of The Vagrants, a novel.
Currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Boston, Rivecca has also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and spent time as a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.
John Freeman, editor of Granta; author Jayne Anne Phillips; and Marie du Vaure, book buyer for California's Vroman's Bookstore will select the winner to be announced live on March 2 at an event (open to the ticket-holding public) in New York City. The runners up will each receive five thousand dollars.
In the video below, Doerr discusses how his grandmother influenced his latest book, radio days, and the best time to write.
The Writer's Notebook compiles the best craft seminars in the history of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, along with a variety of craft essays from some of Tin House's favorite writers. With how-tos, close readings, and personal anecdotes, The Writer's Notebook offers aspiring writers advice and inspiration to hone their own craft.
