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This video by Gavin Edwards is one of the entries in an international competition, sponsored by The Literary Platform, for the best animation of a 1993 audio recording of the late British author Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) predicting the invention of the e-book.
Imagine today that the universe is trying to send you a message. Try to see everything through this imagined perspective. Take note of the day's incidentals that are working to convey this message to you: the guy walking toward you on the street wearing your brother's favorite color, the petals of the same color blowing in the wind, a sign you notice with a saying that strikes you, how the quality of light conjures a past event. Write a poem using these collected images and impressions that reveals the message.
The Twittersphere heated up this afternoon after news broke that no Pulitzer Prize would be awarded for fiction published in 2011. The finalists for the award, also revealed today, were Denis Johnson for Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Karen Russell for Swamplandia! (Knopf), and the late David Foster Wallace for The Pale King (Little, Brown). No explanation has been given regarding the decision to withhold the prize, a move that last occurred in 1977, except that the choice was up to the Pulitzer board, and not this year's judges, Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, and Susan Larson.
On Twitter, Publishers Marketplace news editor Sara Weinman (@sarahw) inquired, where does the money go, if no prize is given? (Each winner receives ten thousand dollars.) Beatrice.com creator Ron Hogan (@RonHogan) bemoaned the perceived necessity of such a prize altogether, writing, "But, but, if we don't have a Pulitzer-winning novel, nobody will get the sales boost, and publishing will be DOOOOOMED! #waaah." Public relations maven Kimberly Burns (@kimberlyburnspr) offered a similar sentiment: "No #Pulitzer for fiction means go to an independent bookstore & ask a bookseller for a recommendation."
But amid the chatter over the Pulitzer in fiction, plenty of attention was sent the way of poetry prize recipient Tracy K. Smith, whose win for Life on Mars (Graywolf Press) came on, of all days, her birthday. The finalists in poetry, also published by small presses, were Forrest Gander for Core Samples From the World (New Directions) and Ron Padgett for How Long (Coffee House Press).
Stephen Greenblatt took the prize in general nonfiction for his National Book Award-winning The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton). The finalists were Diane Ackerman for One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing (Norton) and Mara Hvistendahl for Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs).
The Pulitzer Prizes are given annually for books published in the previous year by American authors.
In the video below, Smith discusses Life on Mars, including what Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey have to do with her winning collection.
This animated film by Vanessa Woods, with sound by Cheryl E. Leonard and Anka Draugelates, was inspired by The Mansion of Happiness, a poetry collection by Robin Ekiss published by the University of Georgia Press in 2009. Featuring original photograms and hundreds of nineteenth-century collage elements, it explores "the philosophical boundaries between myth and memory and between our inner and outer worlds."
Someone's been reading a little too much Sartre! Enjoy your obligatory cat Clip, in which a French feline articulates the pain of existence.
In this video the Associated Press offers a summary of yesterday's announcement that the Justice Department is suing five major publishers and on price-fixing charges. HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster settled the charges Wednesday, leaving Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple in what could be a protracted legal fight.
This video installation by Maria Korporal, featuring a poem by Daìta Martinez, is part of the collective show ANIMA-L-ARTE at Rome's Monte Soratte nature museum.
In partnership with the family of a Vietnam veteran known for his antiwar writing and activism, Iowa Review has launched a multigenre writing contest open to U.S. military veterans and active duty personnel. The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award competition, which offers one thousand dollars and publication in Iowa Review, is accepting entries of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on any subject.
Pulitzer Prize winner and Vietnam veteran Robert Olen Butler will select the winning work from a pool chosen by the journal's editors (all finalists will be considered for publication). Butler, much of whose work is informed by his experiences in the U.S. military, served in Vietnam as an intelligence agent and a translator. He is the author of twelve novels, most recently A Small Hotel (Grove Press, 2011), six short story collections, and a nonfiction book on craft, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (Grove Press, 2005).
Writers may submit their work with a fifteen-dollar entry fee via Submittable or postal mail (an extra ten dollars gets entrants a yearlong subscription to the magazine). The deadline is June 15. Visit the Iowa Review website for complete guidelines.
In the video below, Butler discusses how his time in the military led the former playwright to fiction, and how his experiences in Vietnam have shaped his work.
This video, for Mark Strand's "The Poem of the Spanish Poet," was filmed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s New York City apartment and features animation by director and animation artist Juan Delcan.
The associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers of books by Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, and many others (as well as an issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), gave a hilarious talk at a recent TED conference. Check it out.
