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This original series, about a young poet who discovers a lost manuscript and "the only key to an unsolved thirty-year-old murder," is written by Susan Brennan, directed by Ram Devineni, and produced by Rattapallax Productions. Two episodes have been released and can be viewed at rattapallax.com/blog/verse.
The longlist for the fourth annual Man Asian Literary Prize was announced earlier this week, honoring ten writers hailing from four countries. Among the semifinalists for the thirty-thousand-dollar prize are five novelists whose books are available in English from U.S. publishers, including one independent press. (All eligible titles, by Asian authors, must be written in or translated into English, a reversal of the original rule, which stated that books entered must not have yet been released in English.)
The longlisted titles with editions published in the United States are Three Sisters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Bi Feiyu, Dahanu Road (HarperCollins) by Anosh Irani, Serious Men (Norton) by Manu Joseph, The Changeling (Grove Press) by Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, and Hotel Iris (Picador) by Yoko Ogawa. Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna will be published in March by Grand Central Publishing.
Honored works that have yet to make their way to a U.S. house are Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair, Monkey-Man by Usha K. R., and Below the Crying Mountain by Criselda Yabes.
A shortlist will be revealed in February, and judges Monica Ali, Homi K. Bhabha, and Hsu-Ming Teo will select the winner, to be announced in mid-March. Submissions for the 2011 prize open in May.
In the video below, Mandanna reads a passage from her debut Tiger Hills.
Curtis Brown Creative launches the first creative writing school run by a literary agency; Sam Lipsyte and Margaret Atwood rewrite the narrative of Obama's presidency; the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President Bush signs a book deal; good sex in fiction; and other news.
Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge, an exhibition of photographs, letters, special editions, and other ephemera, is being shown at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, through February 11, 2011. For a look at two of the poet's pen-and-ink drawings featured in the exhibition, check out The Written Image in the January/February 2011 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Most of Rabb’s content is directly inspired by the books he works with, including Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken. “If I’m stuck,” he says, “it usually just means I need to read more…or more closely.”
Not all of Rabb’s sites are intensely interactive. For sites such as the one for Nicholas Thompson's The Hawk and the Dove, the content depends on the author’s wishes and requirements, the specifics of each book, and what the site is intended to accomplish. “I’ll build a site meant to be an active community of an author’s fans differently than I’d build one primarily intended to evoke the emotional content of the book,” he says.
When asked if the author sites he designs, including paisleyhanover.com, will help sell books, Rabb’s honest answer is that he doesn’t know: “I’ve seen people get excited about a book after seeing the site, which is very gratifying. Just how many Amazon clicks this translates to, I couldn’t say.”
“One of the most exciting things about working on book-related websites, especially fiction-related ones,” says Raab, “is the potential to extend the story in some way, to create something that can be seen as a companion piece to the book. The site for Reif Larsen’s novel, The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, is a good example—there is lots and lots of original content, written by the author, that expands on themes and plot lines in the book.”
Rabb’s approach is to create websites, such as the one for Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, that are “rich, atmospheric, and evocative, which hopefully captures something essential about the book,” he says. “If a site like this does its job, it will interest a reader on the strength of the atmosphere. The approach is designed to get an emotional reaction, as well as to provide some information.”
Rabb takes his cue for each project from a unique element of the book. “In the site for Jedediah Berry’s novel The Manual of Detection,” says Rabb, “you can see dossiers on the characters in the book by clicking the folders along the bottom.”
