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In a Paris Review interview, fiction writer Amy Hempel talks about a workshop she took with legendary editor Gordon Lish in which he assigned the class to "write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, 'dismantles your own sense of yourself.'" From this came her story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." Follow Lish's assignment. Write a story about your worst secret.
In the eleven-minute film In the Spotlight (2007), starring Michelle Tea, Guinevere Turner, and Clint Catalyst, with music by Emily Wells, writer and director Hilary Goldberg presents the story of an aspiring author who is offered the chance to be the front person for a literary hoax and discovers a fate far worse than rejection.
Aspring novelist (and "Insane Lunatic") James Andrew Wilson takes us through the five emotional stages of writing a novel.
Based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, and Octavia Spencer, will hit theaters in August.
Eavesdrop on two people having a conversation in a public place. (Avoid small-talk, conversations about the weather.) Write down exactly what they say, including their "ums," "uhs," "likes," and stutters for two pages. Then rewrite that page, using only dialogue, but making it more suited for the literary page; clean it up, keeping the sentiments, but getting rid of all the inconsequential words and lines, and even changing the language to make it more engrossing. (Try to find the subtext behind what they’re saying and what you observed about them while listening.) Compare the original and the revised dialogue. The revision will still be boring, as most people’s conversations are, but the point is to see how fictional dialogue is not the same as spoken dialogue.
This week's fiction prompt comes from fiction writer Teddy Wayne, author of the novel Kapitoil (Harper Perennial, 2010).
The Pulitzer Prizes in letters have been announced, with two women writers snagging literary honors. U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, praised for her "witty, rebellious and yet tender" verse, won for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press). The winner in fiction, Jennifer Egan was honored for the "big-hearted curiosity" of her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), which also recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The finalists in poetry are Maurice Manning for The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Jean Valentine for Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press). Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee received citations in fiction, for The Privileges (Random House) and The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), respectively.
Also of note, writer and doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his "biography" of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner), "an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior."
In the video below, Egan discusses her novel on PBS NewsHour.
Ten Thousand Saints, the debut novel by Eleanor Henderson, whose article about Charles McLeod's first book appears in the current issue, will be published by Ecco in June.
Leading up to the publication of his second novel, Dean Bakopoulos is releasing a series of videos titled "Inventory of American Unhappiness." Bakopoulos's novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June, is the story of Zeke Pappas, the director of a humanities institute in Wisconsin, who is pursuing his life's work: a survey of American unhappiness.
Lionel Shriver, who some posit is among the greatest living American writers, finds her Orange Prize–winning novel recognized for another honor this spring.
The film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton—an actress with more than a few literary films under her belt—is up for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. (Meanwhile, the Independent reports, Shriver has not seen the film and will not go to Cannes, though she was not opposed to the adaptation of her book.)
The novel, Shriver's seventh, took the 2005 Orange Prize, given since 1996 for a novel by a woman of any nationality. We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was rejected by dozens of publishers before finding break-out success, was also voted the Orange Prize "winner of winners" in a public vote last summer. (Shriver dismissed the subsequent honor, however, telling the Independent, "I'm critical of the Orange people on this front. The more prizes you give, the more meaningless they become.")
Whether the story of Kevin will be recognized with another honor will be revealed on the final day of Cannes, May 22.
As part of the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival, novelist Siri Hustvedt, who is profiled in the current issue of the magazine, read an excerpt from The Summer Without Men, published this month by Picador.
