British Library Acquires Expansive Ted Hughes Archive
A major collection of the papers of poet Ted Hughes was acquired on Tuesday for roughly one million dollars by the British Library in London.
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Debut Novelist Wins Booker, NBA Finalists Announced
Debut novelist Aravind Adiga was named the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his book The White Tiger (Atlantic) and the National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 59th annual National Book Awards.
New Books for Writers
A roundup of recently published books about writers and writing.
The following list is a selection of recently published books, arranged alphabetically, about writers and writing.
Catching Life by the Throat: Poems From Eight Great Poets (Norton, April 2008) edited by Josephine Hart. An anthology of essays by canonical poets such as W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath about how to read poetry and why we should. Each essay is accompanied by a selection of the poet's work.
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Teachers Lounge
Read what your colleagues have to say about the craft and theory of writing and teaching.
Bridging the Gap: How to Teach Creative Writing Across the Generational Divide
by Aaron Hamburger
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Assignments
Exercises to help your students find inspiration for their work.
In the essay, “Writing Good Bad Poetry” (Poets & Writers Magazine, page 39), Mike Chasar describes the challenges of writing timely, news-inspired poetry. Choose a recent news story and write a poem about it. Be prepared to discuss the ease and difficulty of such an assignment as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the poem.
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Discussion Topics
Ideas and opinions to spur reflection and debate.
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Milan Kundera Accused of Being an Informant in the 1950s
The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a Czech research group, published a report yesterday that accuses Milan Kundera of telling the police about a supposed spy nearly sixty years ago, according to the Associated Press. Kundera is said to have informed on Miroslav Dvoracek in 1950, when the Czech writer was twenty-one.
Publisher Plans Memorial for David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, the publisher of Infinte Jest (1996) and five other books by David Foster Wallace, has organized a memorial for the author, who committed suicide on September 12 at age forty-six. On October 23 Wallace's friends and colleagues will gather in New York City at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to share their words about the prolific fiction writer and essayist.
An American Didn't Win the Nobel Prize? Big Surprise
A week after Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy and top jury member for the Nobel Prize, criticized American writers in an interview with the Associated Press (AP), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. Not surprisingly, it isn't an American. French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio takes literature's highest honor this year for his "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," the prize committee said in a statement.
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