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We’ve shared our list of the fifty most inspiring authors in the world—those living authors who shake us awake, challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all, inspire us to live life more fully and creatively. Now we want to hear from you: Which authors inspire you?
Before it was possible to read a novel on a Kindle, before there were text messages and Twitter, Gertrude Stein said, "I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do." As innovative as Stein was, it might have been hard for her to imagine today's digital landscape of language and the growing number of online dictionary and language sites, such as Urban Dictionary, Save the Words, and the recently launched Wordnik.
On January 15, City University of Hong Kong, an English-language school with seventeen thousand students and a campus notable for its urban, contemporary architecture, will begin accepting applications for a new low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
The latest casualty in the ongoing siege of academic presses and literary magazines in the economic downturn was recorded last fall when Northwestern University announced plans to end the forty-five-year run of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly as a print publication. After the magazine's final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication.
It may not have been The Year Print Died, but 2009 will undoubtedly go down as the year digital literature became impossible to ignore. From celebrity authors' crowdsourcing stories through Twitter, to the proliferation of online publishing platforms, to the bruiting discord over the Google Book Search settlement, something new is plainly afoot in the publishing world, even if the ramifications for writers are still more a matter of conjecture than measurement.
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.
Fearless, inventive, persistent, beautiful, or just plain badass—here are some of the living authors who shake us awake, challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all, inspire us to live life more fully and creatively.
Author-artists Michael Kimball, Michelle Wildgen, Jesse Ball, Abha Dawesar, and Jen Bervin talk about their "other" creative pursuits—cooking, photography, bookmaking, painting, and drawing—in relation to their writing.
A look at the psychology of writers block and how scientific studies in creativity offer insight into how writers can use the tools they already have to break through.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone and Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
