The Light at Dusk: A Profile of Joan Didion
Having chronicled her husband’s sudden death in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion returns to the subject of loss in a new memoir, Blue Nights, about the subsequent passing of her daughter.
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Genre: Creative Nonfiction
A Story Grows in Brooklyn
This fall the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival is sponsoring a contest for stories and essays centered on the most populous borough of New York City. The organization is looking for "compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages, who can render Brooklyn's rich soul and intangible qualities" using their actual experiences in Kings County as inspiration.
One prose writer, selected by a panel of Brooklyn authors, will receive a prize of four hundred dollars, and the winning piece will be published on the festival website. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, near the borough's downtown area.
Story and essay entries, which should range from four to ten pages (up to twenty-five hundred words), should be submitted via e-mail by November 25. There is no entry fee. For more information, visit the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival blog.
The video below is a trailer for some of last year's festival offerings, featuring shots of Brooklyn past and present.
How to Identify a First Edition
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Learn how to decipher the sometimes arcane methods that publishers use to label first editions (the language and lines of numbers on copyright pages) in this incredibly helpful video from AbeBooks.
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Whiting Awards Help Early-Career Writers "Negotiate With Their Doubts"
Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.
The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.
Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.
"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."
In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).
Chip Kidd's Cover Design for Murakami's 1Q84
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Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.
The Publishing Revolution
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Richard Nash, the former head of Soft Skull Press and currently the CEO of Cursor and publisher of Red Lemonade who's interviewed by Gabriel Cohen in the current issue's special section, is shown here at this year's BookExpo America, where he discussed the ongoing changes in the publishing industry.
Joan Didion
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In this footage from an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw in the 1970s, Joan Didion, who is shown with her late husband John Gregory Dunne, talks about the power of writing ("It's the only aggressive act I have") and her love of California ("I'm not sure I could work in a city"). Of course, Didion moved to New York City in 1988 and has lived there ever since. Near the end of the clip, watch Didion's poignant response to Brokaw's question about her optimism about the future.
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Naomi Wolf Arrested, Denis Leary Hosts Ploughshares Event, and More
Author Naomi Wolf was arrested last night at an Occupy Wall Street protest; Denis Leary's hosting Ploughshares upcoming fortieth anniversary gala; Hunter S. Thompson's correspondence; and other news.
Ruth Gruber
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"My father, he'd say, 'You have to have a career.' I said, 'I want to be a writer.'" Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Ruth Gruber became the youngest PhD in the world before going on to become an international foreign correspondent and photojournalist at age twenty-four. "Ahead of Time," a documentary by Bob Richman, tells the story of how Gruber defied tradition in an extraordinary career that has spanned more than seven decades.
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Two Debut Novels Among National Book Award Contenders
The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced the National Book Award finalists today from Portland on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The finalists in poetry are:
Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa for The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips for Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 (Norton)
Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press)
The finalists in fiction are:
Andrew Krivak for his debut novel, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, who was honored by the NBF last year as a 5 Under 35 author, for her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
Julie Otsuka for her novel The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Jesmyn Ward for her novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury)
This year saw the first graphic book finalist, in the nonfiction category: Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books). The nonfiction shortlist also includes biographies of Malcolm X and Karl and Jenny Marx, as well as Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (Norton), a look at Lucretius's philosophical poem, "On the Nature of Things."
The National Book Award winners will be announced on November 16 in New York City.
In the video below, Finney reads and discusses the story behind a poem from Head Off & Split.
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