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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.
David Foster Wallace studies grows in the academe; Trent Reznor to score Stieg Larsson film adaptation; British Library releases literary artifacts app; the Story Prize short list is announced; and other news.
Write an erasure poem: Rip out one or two pages from a magazine or newspaper. Read through them, underlining words and phrases that appeal to you and that relate to each other. Using a marker or Wite-Out, begin to delete the words around those you underlined, leaving words and phrases that you might want to use. Keep deleting the extra language, working to construct poetic lines with the words you’ve chosen to keep.
The folks at the independent Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put together this tongue-in-cheek video to introduce the fictional television station HBTV—the store's new YouTube channel featuring clips of staff members recommending books.
Poems on the Underground celebrates twenty-five years; the ubiquitous trend of changing nouns into verbs; Canada's Key Porter Books goes out of business; Barnes & Noble has its best holiday sales season since 1997; and other news.
Half in Love: Surving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, was published last week by Counterpoint. In this clip, which was produced shortly after the publication of Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of the poet, Anne Sexton reads her work and appears in home movies taken before her death in 1974.
