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Look through your desk or visit a thrift store or drugstore to find a selection of postcards. Write short missives to yourself in the voice of an imagined character, sending a dozen or so cards to your home address. Allow your reaction to receiving the postcards and the messages themselves, inspire the beginnings of a story.
Diesel Bookstore is an independent neighborhood bookstore that hosts regular author events. The store also has a branch in Del Mar.
Opened in 1996, Blue Willow Bookshop is an independent bookseller and gift shop. The store offers a wide selection of books for adults and children, along with puzzles, games, and gifts. Blue Willow also hosts regular literary events, book club meetings, and story time readings for children.
This short video, which was shot, directed, and edited by Glen Milner for the Daily Telegraph, shows Suzanne St. Albans's novel Mango and Mimosa being printed by Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds, England.
"Variety may be the spice of life, but brevity is its bread and butter," says Terin Izil as she explains why simple, punchy language is often the clearest way to convey a message in this fun, two-minute video animated by Sunni Brown.
Octavia Books is an independent, locally-owned bookstore located uptown in New Orleans. The store regularly hosts author events such as signings, readings, and talks.
Garden District Book Shop resides inside the historic property called the Rink at the corner of Washington Avenue and Prytania Street, in New Orleans’s Garden District. They carry a large collection of new and used regional titles; design, art, and gardening books; fiction and non-fiction; and signed first editions and limited editions by many regionally and nationally acclaimed authors.
Auntie's Bookstore opened in 1978 in the Spokane Flour Mill under the name of “The Book and Game Company” and has been selling books ever since. Auntie’s moved to its current location in the Liberty Building in 1994. The store carries both new and used books, cards, t-shirts, Spokane specialty items, and other gifts. A full-service independent bookstore, this venue holds events, readings, signings, storytime, and more throughout the year.
Last night Steven Millhauser took the Story Prize, the annual award celebrating a short story collection published in the previous year, at a ceremony in New York City. Following readings by the author, who began his career as a novelist (a Pulitzer Prize–winning one, at that), and his fellow finalists, Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman, Millhauser's We Others (Knopf) was announced as the selection for this year's twenty-thousand-dollar award.
Millhauser, who admits influences ranging from Dr. Seuss's And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street to makers, inventors, and craftsman (including those ne'er-do-wells of his youth who revealed their secret, and unmatched, talents in woodshop), was recognized for his skill at pushing the boundaries of the imaginative process. As prize director Larry Dark noted in his onstage interview with the author, one uniting feature of Millhauser's oeuvre is the "escalation of efforts" exemplified in stories such as "Snowmen," which the author presented last night. Millhauser followed the story with a reading of a "thingamajig," which he asked the audience to regard as such, avoiding classifying the two-minute lyric romp as a "poem" or "story."
Both DeLillo, shortlisted for The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner), and Pearlman, a finalist for Binocular Vision (Lookout Books), took home five thousand dollars each. The judges for this year's award were author Sherman Alexie, translator Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman of the Los Angeles Public Library.
After the prizes were presented (and the authors swamped with readers seeking autographs), the evening wound down with a party for the finalists, an intimate celebration in a Greenwich Village restaurant befitting the tiny beauty of, as DeLillo put it, "the classic American form."
Record the slogans you see on billboards and in other advertising as you go about your daily routine—Prescription Drug Misuse Is a Growing Trend; Forever Engagements; Truth & Honesty: That's the Manfredi Way! Choose one from the list you've gathered and use it as the opening line for a story.
