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Giving a public reading, for most writers, involves a good deal of anxiety, a powerful dose of pride in one's work, and the cool relief of getting through the experience without humiliation. Payment often comes in the form of applause. But for those writers whose names regularly appear on book jackets and prize announcements, public readings can mean big business—and big paychecks.
In January, National Geographic Books launched a series that offers a different kind of travel book—one that uses the unique perspective of a writer to explore the larger implications of place.
Writers, publishers, and bookstore owners who have profited a great deal from the success of Oprah's Book Club reeled from the announcement on April 5 that Oprah Winfrey had made her last monthly book club selection, for nothing else could elevate a book to the status of best-seller quite like it.
This is not an essay. Though maybe, in a way, it is. Because it's a strange thing about essays—even talking about them, trying to get at what they are, it's hard not to cleave to the spirit of the essay, that inconclusive, most outwardly formless of forms, which spills and seeps into so many other kinds of writing-memoir, feature, commentary, review—and punctuates every assertion with a qualification, a measure of doubt, an alternate possibility.
Poet and editor Dave Smith will resign in July from The Southern Review, the literary journal based at Louisiana State University that he has been co-editing since 1990. Smith, who turns 60 in December, will leave Baton Rouge and the literary post of his hero, the poet Robert Penn Warren who started the journal, for a Chair in Poetry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The move will allow him to remain in the South, his home and the inspiration for much of his work.
W. S. Merwin made his first appearance at the Village Voice bookstore on May 27, the same evening a hailstorm hit Paris. Merwin is the author of 20 books of poems, four books of prose, and nearly 20 books of translations, including one of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is scheduled for publication in October by Knopf.
When Amazon began selling used books alongside new titles in November 2000, top executives at the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers protested the practice, arguing that it pays nothing to writers and publishers. Nearly two years later, the online retail giant's successful marketing of used books has renewed the dispute.
The seventh annual Firecracker Alternative Book Awards, celebrating "insurrectionary culture that lights a fire under the complacent mainstream booty," were announced on May 3 at a ceremony in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The Library of Congress announced on April 25 that Billy Collins will serve a second term as U.S. poet laureate.
On April 1 Tree Swenson took up the post of executive director of the Academy of American Poets, the New York City–based membership organization responsible for founding National Poetry Month. Swenson succeeds William Wadsworth.
