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Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Pleiades, Nashville Review, Sycamore Review, One Story, the Oxford American, the Awakenings Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Bound Off.
Poet and musician Jim Carroll was putting the finishing touches on a novel when he passed away on September 11, 2009. Next week Viking will publish that novel, The Petting Zoo. This is the music video of The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died,” which appeared on the soundtrack of the 1995 film version of his autobiography, The Basketball Diaries, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
In the September/October 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we published the essay "Taking It to the Streets: My Year in Guerrilla Publishing" in which Mike Heppner writes about his trajectory from commercially published author to small press author to self-published, D-I-Y author. In this video, Heppner describes the final stage of his Man Talking Project: hand-delivering his manuscript to one of his readers.
The winners of this year’s fifty-thousand-dollar Whiting Writers' Awards, given to promising writers nominated by established authors and literary professionals across the United States, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. This marks the twenty-fifth year of the prizes, which have bolstered the early careers of luminaries including Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, and C. D. Wright.
The winning poets are Matt Donovan, author of the collection Vellum (Mariner Books, 2007); Jane Springer, author of Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007); and L. B. Thompson, whose chapbook is Tendered Notes (Center for Book Arts, 2003). The fiction winners are Michael Dahlie, author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living (Norton, 2008); Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of the short story collection Sightseeing (Grove Press, 2004); and Lydia Peelle, author of the story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (Harper Perennial, 2009). The nonfiction winners are Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last February; Amy Leach, whose essay collection about animals, plants, and stars is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2012; and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (The Dial Press, 2009).
Six of the winners hold MFAs—from New York University, University of Iowa’s nonfiction program, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Washington University—and two hold doctorate degrees. Among the magazines that have published multiple winners’ works are Granta, the New Yorker, and Orion. Full biographies on the winners are posted on the Web site of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, sponsor of the awards.
In the video below, creative nonfiction winner Sayrafiezadeh reveals a dirty little literary secret.
One of this year's MacArthur fellows, each of whom received $500,000, is Matthew Carter, a master type designer, who during his career has designed over 250 fonts. Most recently Carter has focused on developing easily readable fonts for computer screens, including those for handheld devices.
Asunder, a collection of short stories and a novella by Robert Lopez, was published early this month by Dzanc Books, one of the innovative presses featured in the current issue.
Artist Andre da Loba animates a sentence, with music by Tim Leeds, from Roberto Ransom's "Three Figures and a Dog," published in the fourth issue of Electric Literature
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and recently named a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, Emma Donoghue's novel Room, published last month by Little, Brown, is getting a lot of attention despite—or perhaps because of—its rather disturbing premise.
British author Howard Jacobson, who has been described as the love child of Jane Austen and Philip Roth, won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question.
Artist Alice Cohen animates and scores a sentence from Joy Williams's story "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child," published in the fourth issue of Electric Literature.
