Jack Kerouac
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This clip from early 1967 includes footage of Jack Kerouac shooting pool at the Pawtucketville Social Club in Lowell, Massachusetts, and an audio recording of Kerouac reading the beginning of "San Francisco Scene."
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Genre: Fiction
Debuts Up for Man Booker Prize
The shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize was announced today, including first-time novelists Stephen Kelman and A. D. Miller. The two, along with four other authors, are in contention for a prize of fifty thousand pounds (approximately eighty thousand dollars).
The shortlisted titles, chosen from thirteen semifinalists, are The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape), Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books), The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta), Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail), Pigeon English by Kelman (Bloomsbury), and Snowdrops by Miller (Atlantic). DeWitt and Edugyan both hail from Canada, and the other four authors are British.
On October 18 the winner will be announced at London's Guildhall. The five runners-up won't leave the ceremony empty-handed; each will receive an award of twenty five hundred pounds (about four thousand dollars).
Labor Day
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With work on their minds this Labor Day weekend (when many of us are taking three days off), the fine folks at Open Road Media take a look at how several writers, including Andres Dubus and Don Winslow, paid the bills while they were struggling to make it in the literary world.
Paper Casting
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Christopher Fritton of the Western New York Book Arts Center demonstrates the process of creating part of a book for the artist Richard Tuttle.
Norton Revives Liveright Imprint
This summer W. W. Norton announced plans to resurrect Liveright & Company, the storied imprint that introduced American readers to early works by luminaries such as Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.
The Urgency of Knowing: A Profile of Julie Otsuka
In her second novel, Julie Otsuka returns to the chapter in Japanese American history that captured the attention of so many fans of her debut: the relocation camps of World War II.
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The Dubious Salvation of Jack V.
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In September Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish South African author Jacques Strauss's debut novel, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V., about eleven-year-old Jack Viljee, whose hometown of Johannesburg in 1989 is still ruled by apartheid.
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In Stores Now
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Seth Fried, whose story collection The Great Frustration was published by Soft Skull Press in May, finds a simple way of getting good placement of his debut book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City.
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September 1
In honor of the birthday (August 30, 1797) this week of Mary Shelley, author of the classic Frankenstein, a novel she based on a dream, write a horror story, using material from your most memorable nightmares, should you need it.
Booktrack
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Now available in the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, Booktrack provides a soundtrack for e-books, including songs, ambient music, and sound effects, that is automatically paced to an individual's reading speed.
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