Jump to navigation Skip to content
Barnes & Noble, Inc. recently announced the finalists for the 2003 Discover Great New Writers Awards. The winners in each category will receive $10,000. Second-place finalists receive $2,500, and third-place finalists receive $1,000. The winners will be named on March 3.
The National Book Critics Circle, a professional organization composed of 600 book critics and reviewers from across the country, recently announced the finalists for this year's book awards.
At some point every writer must turn her attention from the art of creating to the business of selling. And while many authors would like to avoid the industry altogether, a basic understanding of it—from the top five houses to the independents—is an unavoidable necessity.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Ugly Duckling Presse, Del Sol Press, Scienter Press, and Low Fidelity Press.
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen and Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey.
Six months ago Larry Portzline, a professor of writing and literature at Harrisburg Community College in Pennsylvania, started a grassroots movement called Bookstore Tourism—a series of bus trips to urban centers where reader-tourists can patronize independent bookstores. At the end of March, a group of readers from the Harrisburg area will travel approximately 200 miles to the 10th annual Virginia Festival of the Book, where they will participate in festival events (readings, book signings, seminars, and so on) and visit the many independent bookstores that are in Charlottesville, Virginia, including New Dominion Bookshop, the Book Cellar, and Blue Whale Books.
In 1998, Dan Bowers, an engineering consultant in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, was on a mission. His son-in-law, Chief Master Sergeant Frederick Honeywell, was serving at an Air Force base in Kuwait that had no recreational facilities and no library—and indeed, no books. When Honeywell's wife, Chris, told her father about the problem, Bowers sent some of his own books, as well as donations from others, overseas. It was the first deployment of what eventually became Operation Paperback. Six years later, the nonprofit organization has sent nearly 150,000 books to American troops in more than 30 locations, including Afghani-stan, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Northeastern Wyoming is a rugged place, where the ruins of turn-of-the-century homesteads still stand in the tall grass, and communities gather every spring to watch cowboys wrestle their calves down for branding. An average of five people per mile populate this High Plains landscape of low, bison-backed hills and rushing creeks. Such rough, isolated grace makes the region an ideal, though unexpected, environment for an artists colony—or better yet, two of them.
At some point during her two-year stint atop an ancient 200-foot redwood tree in Humboldt County, California—an effort to to save the old-growth forest—environmental activist and writer Julia Butterfly Hill was approached by HarperSanFrancisco for the rights to publish her memoir, Legacy of Luna. Hill accepted the offer, with one stipulation: Her book had to be printed on 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper manufactured without the use of chlorine bleach.
