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Advancements in print-on-demand technology, such as the Espresso Book Machine, are offering publishers and authors alike new opportunities to bridge the still-pronounced divide between electronic and "tangible" publishing.
When wildfire tore through Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in the spring of 2004, nearly everything, aside from some tall oak trees, was destroyed. Now, after almost six years of fund-raising, brainstorming, architectural planning, and construction, Dorland is once again welcoming writers.
Tom Corwin is hitting the road this spring on a cross-country bookmobile trip; Faber & Faber is starting a new creative writing school in Canada; bloggers draw attention to the various editors of the 2010 Best American series of anthologies, all of whom are white men; and other news.
On the occasion of the its 125th anniversary, the Boston Pops has announced a (short and snappy) writing competition, awarding a trip to attend the orchestra's nationally broadcast July 4 concert this summer. Each entry should explain—or make a more creative argument, perhaps—why the widely-recorded orchestra founded by Civil War veteran Henry Lee Higginson should send the writer and family to the Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on the Charles River Esplanade.
The winner and three companions will receive a three-day trip to Boston and event admission, including an opportunity to meet conductor Keith Lockhart, who has expanded the Pops oeuvre to include collaborations with pop and indie musicians, after the show.
Submissions, due May 15, can be made on the Boston Pops Web site, via the orchestra's Twitter and Facebook pages, and by text message. The only guidelines are that each submission must be 125 characters or fewer, and only one entry may be submitted. The winner will be selected on May 22.
In the video below, Lockhart offers a bit of Pops history while announcing the other events celebrating the anniversary season:
Wordnik announces its new Smartwords initiative; a look at last year's best-seller lists, arranged by American city; Knopf will publish New Yorker editor David Remnick's biography of Barack Obama; Dell plans to release its Mini 5 tablet; and other news.
Villagers in Yemen protest the country's dictator poet laureate; Alibris aquires Monsoon; Salman Rushdie announces plans for a book on the fatwa years; a Chicago teacher is changing lives through spoken word; and other news.
Yesterday the Los Angeles Times announced the finalists for the 2009 Book Awards in poetry and fiction, among other genres. The winners, who will each receive a five hundred dollar honorarium, will be announced on April 23, just prior to the weekend-long Times Festival of Books.
The finalists in poetry are:
Gabrielle Calvocoressi for Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books)
Amy Gerstler for Dearest Creature (Penguin Poets)
Tom Healy for What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books)
Brenda Hillman for Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon for }Open Interval{, (University of Pittsburgh Press)
The finalists in fiction, all for novels, are:
Jill Ciment for Heroic Measures
(Pantheon)
Jane Gardam for The Man in the Wooden Hat (Europa Editions)
Michelle Huneven for Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kate Walbert for A Short History of Women
(Scribner)
Rafael Yglesias for A Happy Marriage
(Scribner)
The finalists for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, named for the Times editor and founder of the Book Awards, are:
Petina Gappah for the story collection An Elegy for Easterly (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Paul Harding for his novel Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press)
Philipp Meyer for his novel American Rust (Spiegel & Grau)
Daniyal Mueenuddin for his story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Wells Tower for his story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
(Mueenuddin and Tower also are both in the running for the twenty-thousand-dollar Story Prize, along with Victoria Patterson for Drift. The winner will be announced next week.)
Three judges in each category, none of whom are employed by the Times, select the Book Awards finalists and winners, and there is no external submission process. The winners of two additional literary honors to be distributed at the April ceremony, the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement among writers of the American West—given this year to Evan S. Connell—and the new Innovator's Award, which will go to Dave Eggers, are determined by an internal panel of Times staff.
The PEN American Center celebrates Black History Month with author tributes and rare recordings; the Boston Public Library faces major closures due to budget cuts; a poet in Florida is accused of killing her boyfriend; thousands of authors opt out of the Google Settlement; and other news.
We asked Ander Monson, editor of the literary journal DIAGRAM and judge of the magazine's 2010 Innovative Fiction Contest, to weigh in on what he'll be looking for in the submission pile. The competition, which awards one thousand dollars and publication in DIAGRAM, is open to stories of up to ten thousand words until March 8.
Monson says that he usually reads all of the submissions that come in, along with DIAGRAM fiction editors Sarah Blackman and Lauren Slaughter, and then the finalists go on to an outside judge, but this year he'll also make the ultimate pick. Read on for his take on the selection process, beginning with the evaluation of every entry—at least twice.
"We never know what we're looking for in the contest until we see it. Each year we get different stories told in different ways, and the decisions are extremely difficult, and we don't often agree. Almost always, interestingly, my own personal favorites in years past have coincided with the [final] judges' picks, so I think we're on the same page. And this year we are more obviously on the same page.
"As a reader I value a real sense of language textures in a story. Sometimes that manifests itself as an idiosyncratic voice, or in idiosyncratic forms—which for this reader are always welcome. But I also want story—I want to be moved, to be riveted.
"What I want is what I think we all want every time we read stories: We want to be enraptured and entertained. We call it the Innovative Fiction Prize because as an online and, more than occasionally, new media journal, DIAGRAM tries to publish stories that take more risks. So I'd say that what we want is either 1) something really and actually new; or else 2) something old, but told/written/created in such a way that it subverts our expectations of what we think a story can be, and yet it delivers the things that great stories deliver: mystery, beauty, terror, depth, a sense of a living and fully-realized consciousness, revelation, movement, hilarity, even shock, so it reads as new.
"I absolutely want my expectations subverted, and then rewarded with something strange and wonderful. I/we want to be surprised. We don't know how stories are being told, how they are going to be told in the future. Maybe with interactivity. Maybe with images. Maybe via code. Who knows. But we would very much like to see and be shown. Which is why we award the prize, to encourage and reward the most interesting stories/fictions we can find. Because we know there are plenty of somebodies out there writing them, and we want them to think of DIAGRAM as a place for interesting and innovative art. Which I think it is."
DIAGRAM's Chapbook Contest is also under way, open to manuscript submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or multi-genre work. Check out the guidelines for that contest and more in our Grants & Awards database.
The world's biggest book club started in a hair salon in Texas; the French National Library pays millions for a Casanova manuscript; the finalists for oddest book title of the year are announced; and other news.
