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Choose an article from a magazine that profiles a person, such as a celebrity, a political figure, or a professional athlete. Using one of the settings in the article and a fictionalized version of the person as the main character, write a story in which it is revealed that the main character's greatest strength is also his or her greatest failing.
The highly anticipated film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road finally has a trailer. Set to premiere in the U.K. on September 21, director Walter Salles's movie stars Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarity, and Kristen Stewart as Dean's wife Marylou. A release date for the U.S. has not been set.
The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Among the winners was Edith Pearlman, whose fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), had also been nominated for the National Book Award last year, and went on to win the PEN/Malamud Award.
In poetry, Laura Kasischke won for her collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), which recently received the first Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. Mira Bartók won in autobiography for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press).
Awards were also given in criticism, to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press); in biography, to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); and in general nonfiction, to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).
Awards were also given to reviewer Kathryn Schulz, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books, who won this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the video below, Pearlman reads from her winning collection.
Fill in the generalities with details and use the following to begin a scene for a story: CHARACTER NAME sits at his/her desk in his/her office above Guiliani's Pizza on STREET NAME in CITY NAME. He/she leans down and removes his/her shoes, placing them neatly by the bookcase, then picks up the phone.
Her Majesty's Secret Players present "Pulp Shakespeare," an Elizabethan take on Quentin Tarantino's 1994 movie, now playing at Theatre Asylum on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Believer, the monthly whose mission, in part, is to "focus on writers and books we like," has named its finalists for the 2011 Believer Book Award for fiction. Of the five books selected by the magazine's editors as the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year," four are published by small, independent presses.
The shortlisted titles are Jesse Ball's third novel, The Curfew (Vintage), which the Believer's editors describe as "a tortuous snake of a story" that winds up resembling "an ouroboros swallowing its own tail"; Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (New Directions), a novel "preoccupied with the question of what genius looks like"; Lars Iyer's novel debut, Spurious (Melville House), whose pleasures are evocative of Beckett; Widow (Bellevue Literary Press), the first short story collection from novelist Michelle Latiolais, whose "narrators navigate familiar landscapes rendered nearly impassable by grief"; and Ben Lerner, who has previously published three poetry collections, for his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press).
The winner of the Believer Book Award will be announced in the May 2012 issue. Readers' nominations for best books of 2011 will appear alongside prize announcement.
In the video below, the Center for Fiction and n+1 magazine present a dramatic reading from DeWitt's shortlisted third novel (the second segment of the two-part reading is here).
In this new video from Open Road Media, bestselling authors Alice Walker, Erica Jong, and Alix Kates Shulman talk about their work advocating for women, writing about women, and exploring stories about the female experience.
Shenandoah, the literary journal published by Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has doubled the prize purse for its second annual short short story contest—which still has no entry fee.
The Bevel Summers Prize, which received over two hundred submissions in its inaugural year, now offers a five-hundred-dollar award, and the winner will also see her miniature fiction published in Shenandoah.
The judge will be fiction writer Chris Galaver, an assistant professor at Washington and Lee. Galaver is the author of the novel-in-stories School for Tricksters, published last month by Southern Methodist University Press.
Writers may submit up to three stories of no more than one thousand words each by March 31. The winner will be announced in June. For complete guidelines, visit the magazine's prize page online.
Women & Children First is one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country, stocking more than thirty thousand books by and about women, children’s books for all ages, and the best of lesbian and gay fiction and nonfiction. The bookstore hosts book launches, talks, and readings across multiple genres.
