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Nine ways of understanding earthquakes through literature; the return of the London Book Fair; the opening lines of David Foster Wallace's soon-to-be-released The Pale King; Hollywood's favorite author; and other news.
The documentary Behind Those Books, written by Kaven Brown, directed by Mills Miller, and featuring interviews with Terry McMillan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Kevin Powell, is billed as "the first and only comprehensive documentation, on film, of the urban literature genre, giving viewers a raw and uncut look inside the emerging industry." It will premiere May 28 at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City.
Arcadia Books will feature prominently in Woody Allen's next film; a bumper crop of marijuna-themed books; Salman Rushdie tries his hand at writing for television; James Frey completes the Bible; and other news.
In this rather raw clip, Nick Demske responds to the political situation in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of protesters—some of them on tractors—descended on the state Capitol over the weekend, with a poem.
Choose a poem that you are in the process of revising. Draw a map of that poem, paying attention to the details of its landscape, its realities and abstractions, its landmarks, the spacial relationships among its features. Use the map to guide a revision of the initial work.
A Poet's Guide to Poetry brings Mary Kinzie's expertise as poet, critic, and director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University to bear in a comprehensive reference work. Detailing the formal concepts of poetry and methods of poetic analysis, she shows how the craft of writing can guide the art of reading poems. Using examples from the major traditions of lyric and meditative poetry in English from the medieval period to the present, Kinzie considers the sounds and rhythms of poetry along with the ideas and thought-units within poems.
Last night the National Book Critics Circle celebrated its favorite books of 2010, announcing National Book Critics Circle Award winners in poetry, fiction, and autobiography. C. D. Wright took home the prize in poetry for One With Others (Copper Canyon), a work of verse journalism investigating the Civil Rights movement in the poet's native Arkansas.
"She’s developed a new form, if not a new genre," says NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher in a review of Wright's book, "that allows for a new blending of fact and feeling, one which could help us tell our stories going forward, if only we’ll let it school us."
In fiction, Jennifer Egan won in fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf). Board member Collette Bancroft says of Egan's time-leaping novel-in-stories, "A Visit From the Goon Squad wraps big themes—art and its relationship with technology, the fluid nature of the self, love and its loss—in stories with a satiric edge, believable but never predictable characters, and a range of styles masterfully rendered."
In autobiography, Darin Strauss won for Half a Life (McSweeney's Books), a memoir of the author's life after a devastating accident involving one of his high school classmates. "What might have been exploitative instead feels important, and dearly won," says board member Karen Long.
In the video below, filmed last week, Wright reads from her winning volume at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
The future is bright again for the Los Angeles Public Library; Goodreads acquires Discovereads.com; Funny or Die is set to launch a book imprint; the Poetry Center of Chicago finds a home; and other news.
Since its release last year, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, a documentary directed by Lilly Rivlin, has won awards at several film festivals, including the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
Abe's Penny, a "micro-magazine" that presents stories and poems serialized on postcards along with images, is looking for poems to accompany four series of photographs it will present in a Miami exhibition this April. The magazine will accept entries live at the New World School of the Arts' ArtSeen gallery on April 2, opening night of its exhibition featuring works by photographers Robby Campbell, Francie Bishop Good, Lee Materazzi, and Samantha Salzinger (and, incidentally, poetry readings by Gabby Calvocoressi and Denise Duhamel).
Writers will also have to opportunity to submit work during poetry and music events promoting the exhibition's run, which ends on April 26. (The show is held in conjunction with the new, monthlong, O, Miami literary festival, and information about all events is available on the festival Web site.) At the end of April, Abe's Penny will select one collaboration to publish as an issue of its magazine, which will be published piece-by-piece over the course of four weeks.
Writers visiting the gallery are invited to pen their poetry in "utopian but functional" workspaces created by New World School students. In order to offer writers more time to interact with the photography, the gallery will open to poets one hour prior to each scheduled event. There is no fee to submit poems, and the events are free and open to the public.
