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Okay, this is just about the best thing we've watched all summer. Check out this video of Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore inside Michael Seidenberg's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Why is it secret? Just watch this.
Reading from his second novel, The Storm at the Door, published last month by Random House, Stefan Merrill Block was the featured author at the Franklin Park Reading Series, held on the second Monday of every month at the Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Choose a unique historical moment, the first that comes to mind: the Crimean War, the first lunar landing, the invention of the wheel, or something seemingly less dramatic, such as the building of the first traffic light. Then spend some time researching the moment you chose—dig into a few sources, make a page of notes. Create a character who lives on the periphery of the event—a witness or minor player, yet someone living at the intersection of history. The character can be swept up by the event or remotely affected, battle against it or be its biggest cheerleader. Write his or her story.
Check out this time-lapse video of a new Half Price Books store being built in San Antonio. The store opens for business tomorrow.
The Caine Prize for African Writing, a major award given annually for a single short story written in English by an African writer, has been awarded to Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, the pseudonym of Cornell University instructor Elizabeth Tshele. Since earning her MFA at Cornell, Tshele has remained with the university teaching composition and creative writing under the Truman Capote Fellowship.
The ten thousand pound prize (approximately sixteen thousand dollars) was awarded for the story "Hitting Budapest," published in the November/December 2010 issue of Boston Review. Tshele received her award at a ceremony in Oxford, England, yesterday.
"The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles," said chair of judges Hisham Matar. "This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language."
Also shortlisted for the award were Tim Keegan of South Africa for "What Molly Knew," Lauri Kubuitsile of Botswana for "In the spirit of McPhineas Lata," Beatrice Lamwaka of Uganda for "Butterfly dreams," and David Medalie of South Africa for "The Mistress’s Dog." All of the finalists' pieces originally appeared in story collections.
In this blast from the past, School House Rock! presents "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here," which first aired in 1974 as part of the series of educational short films featuring music that, nearly forty years later, is still difficult to get out of one's mind. Remember "Conjunction Junction," which first aired in 1973? Who could forget?
The Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced yesterday, recognizing noteworthy Australian novels and the "efforts and sacrifices" of their writers.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard presented the award for fiction to New Zealand native Stephen Daisley, whose debut novel, Traitor, was released last year by Text Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Australia.
Daisley, who now lives in Perth, Australia, received eighty thousand Australian dollars (roughly eighty-six thousand U.S. dollars), an award which the fifty-six-year-old author says will help his family "survive a bit more." The author, who worked without publication for twenty years, told the Sydney Morning Herald that he persevered with his work because writing is his "bliss."
The shortlisted novelists were each awarded five thousand Australian dollars (about five thousand four hundred U.S. dollars). They are Roberta Lowing for Notorious (Allen & Unwin), Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran (Random House), David Musgrave for Glissando: A Melodrama (Sleepers Publishing), and Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance (Macmillan).
The German Haus der Kulturen der Welt has awarded its twenty-five-thousand-euro (roughly thirty-five-thousand-dollar) International Literature Award to Russian writer Mikhail Schischkin for his novel Venushaar (Maiden's Hair). The novel, which has won several awards in Russia but took seven years to make its way into translation in Germany—and remains untranslated in the United States—was selected for the prize from among over one hundred books translated from twenty-four languages and originating in fifty countries.
Among the finalists for the prize, which honors translations of books from any language into German, were Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat for the translation of her memoir Brother, I'm Dying, which was published by Knopf in the United States in 2007; Elias Khoury for Yalo, originally written in Arabic and released in English by Archipelago Books in 2008; and Mathias Énard for Zone, translated from the French and published last December in English by Open Letter. A list of all the finalists and their German publishers is available on the prize website.
The jury, comprised of editors, translators, critics, and authors, called Schischkin a "wordsmith of the highest order" who has "developed a unique form of novel" and "plays with
perspectives and settings, with the most diverse verbal registers and stylistic positions." His translator, Andreas Tretner of Berlin, who has been translating works from the Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian since the mid-eighties, was also praised for "finding a German lid for every Russian pot."
Think about an incident from your life—something especially monumental, unexpected, or traumatic that altered the way you see the world. Write a story or essay about it, but from someone else’s perspective. You can appear as a character in the story, but explore it from outside of yourself, as an event that happened, but not one that happened to you.
A Good Hard Look, Ann Napolitano's second novel, is a fictionalization of the last few years of Flannery O'Connor's life in Milledgeville, Georgia. In this clip, the author and her editor, Jenny Smith, discuss the book, which will be published this week by Penguin Press.
