Book Fresheners
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This ad campaign, developed by the Voskhod ad agency for the bookstore 100,000 Books in Yekaterinburg, Russia, recently won an award at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity .
Genre: Fiction
D.C. Writer Wins Book Prize for Stories Tackling Race, Womanhood, and Otherness
The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, has announced the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize, given annually for a novel or short story collection. Danielle Evans won the one-thousand-dollar prize for her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books), which earlier this year was longlisted for the Story Prize and given an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.
Evans's debut book takes its title from "The Bridge Poem" by Kate Rushin (The Black Back-Ups, Firebrand Books, 1993), whose meditation on the phenomenon of one group's "translating" their lives for the benefit of another group influenced the themes of Your Own Fool Self. "Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything," Evans told the Washington Post, "and there's a lot of room for complication, contradiction, and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction."
Evans received the prize over fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna (and current Workshop director) Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (W. W. Norton), Deborah Eisenberg's The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador), Patricia Engel's Vida (Black Cat), Lily King's Father of the Rain (Atlantic Monthly Press), Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
In the video below, novelist Tayari Jones praises Evans's book. (And in the video here, the Washington Post's video book reviewer Ron Charles—who recently won an award of his own—takes on Evans's collection.)
June 23
Track down what's referred to as "the Flitcraft parable" or "the Falling Beams story" in Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon. Read it first as a period piece, but then try to bring it closer to your world. Focus on that devastating final line of the story, "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling." Read that sentence over and over again, and allow yourself to feel the promise and the terror contained within the sentence—the promise of change, the terror of sameness. Now begin a story using that sentence and see where it leads you.
This week's fiction prompt comes from Siddhartha Deb, author of the novels The Point of Return (HarperCollins, 2002) andAn Outline of the Republic (Ecco, 2005). His book of nonfiction, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, will be published in August by Faber and Faber.
Turkeys Attack Author
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Watch this footage of wild turkeys attacking Michigan author Bonnie Jo Campbell, whose new novel, Once Upon a River, will be published next month by W. W. Norton. Then read Kevin Nance's profile of Campbell in the July/August issue.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
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In this rare footage, filmed just weeks before his death on July 7, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaks about Sherlock Holmes, the scientific method, fan letters, and his interest in psychic phenomenon.
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Literary Fathers
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From Open Road Media comes this video of Kaylie Jones and Andre Dubus III sharing memories of their dads.
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Steve Earle
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Colum McCann Takes IMPAC Prize
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the most lucrative honor of its kind at one hundred thousand euros (more than one hundred forty thousand dollars), was announced this afternoon. Irish-born author Colum McCann, who currently resides in New York City, won the 2011 award for his novel Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009).
The "genuinely twenty-first century novel that speaks to its time but is not enslaved by it" won the National Book Award in 2009. It was selected for the IMPAC Award from among more than one hundred sixty titles nominated by one hundred sixty-six libraries around the world.
Other finalists this year were Americans Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna, Yiyun Li for The Vagrants, Joyce Carol Oates for Little Bird of Heaven and Irish writers Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn and William Trevor for Love and Summer. Also shortlisted are Michael Crummey of Canada for Galore and Australian writers David Malouf for Ransom, Craig Silvey for Jasper Jones, and Evie Wyld for After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice.
In the video below, McCann discusses his winning novel on a recent episode of City University of New York's video program City Talk.
June 16
Write a story using the following as the first sentence: There are three things she told me never to do.
Philip K. Dick
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Nearly all of his forty-four published books were science fiction, but Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982, has influenced countless writers and filmmakers with sociological, political, and metaphysical themes that trenscend genre. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this fall, is the author's final work.
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