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Poet Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, about her recovery from alcoholism following the death of her fourteen-month-old son, is published this month by Free Press. Check out this and other new and noteworthy books in the July/August issue's Page One section.
Didn't like that novel? Disappointed with that poetry collection? Consider turning it into art using the simple steps in this brief how-to video.
Last night in Brooklyn the Moby Awards, sponsored by indie press Melville House, celebrated the best, worst, and weirdest of last year's book trailers. A panel of critics, editors, and other lit types representing the Huffington Post, McNally Jackson Books, the Millions, GoodReads, and more selected the following to receive the honorary golden sperm whale.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Ron Charles for his Totally Hip Video Book Review Series for the Washington Post
Grand Jury/We’re Giving You This Award Because Otherwise You’d Win Too Many Other Awards
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object
How Did You Get This Number? by Sloane Crosley
Best Small House
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Best Big House
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
Worst Performance by an Author
Jonathan Franzen in his Freedom trailer
Most Celebtastic Performance
James Franco in the trailer for Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story
Worst Small / No House
Pirates: The Midnight Passage by James R. Hannibal
Worst Big House
Savages by Don Winslow
What Are We Doing To Our Children?
It’s A Book by Lane Smith
General Technical Excellence and Courageous Pursuit of Gloriousness
Electric Literature, including the below short "Can a Book Save Your Life?"
Most Monkey Sex
Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods
Worst Soundtrack
Ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley
Most Angelic Angel Falling to Earth
Teen tome Torment by Lauren Kate
Most Conflicted (we published the book but the trailer is sooo good!)
The Beaufort Diaries by T Cooper
"Just because it happened doesn't make it interesting." Author and teacher Marion Roach Smith offers this and other priceless nuggets of advice for anyone thinking of writing a memoir in The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on June 9.
The twenty-third annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night in New York City. Coinciding with this year's Book Expo America, the awards event brought out over four hundred attendees in celebration of LGBT literature.
Adam Haslett was honored for his novel, Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese), the follow-up to his story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday, 2002), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Eileen Myles, author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, won the award in lesbian fiction for Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (OR Books).
Anna Swanson and Brian Teare took the prizes in poetry, Swanson for her debut collection, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books), and Teare for Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). Two novelists won in debut fiction, Amber Dawn for Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press) and David Pratt for Bob the Book (Chelsea Station Editions). The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet (Harper Perennial) by Myrlin Hermes won in bisexual fiction, and Holding Still For as Long as Possible (House of Anansi Press) by Zoe Whittall received the transgender fiction prize.
Barbara Hammer and Julie Marie Wade were also recognized for their memoirs, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (Feminist Press) and Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press), respectively. A complete list of winners, including honorees in drama, anthology, and young adult literature, is posted on the Lambda Literary website.
In the video below, fiction winner Haslett presents a dramatic reading of passages from Union Atlantic.
Looking for a distinctive cover for your homemade chapbook or writing journal? Check out book artist Pam Deluco's process of using recycled denim to make paper in this video, which was produced by Shape What's to Come, an online community of women sponsored by—who else?—Levi's. When your cover is ready, have a look at DIY: How to Make and Bind Chapbooks.
We've all seen movie trailers and book trailers, but here's a new one: a trailer for an undergraduate lecture course that was offered last fall at the University of Michigan. "Comparative Literature 382: Literature and the Other Arts: Dividing Time: Art House Animation and Poetics" used animated films, poems, short stories, aesthetic theory, and film criticism to examine "how the timing, technique, technology, attention to audience, and intertextual relations of a given work condition our experience of it."
Quiddity, a literary journal out of Benedictine University in Springfield, Illinois, has launched its inaugural contest for a prose book trailer. The biennial competition is open to short films based on both unpublished manuscripts and published books of fiction or creative nonfiction, offering a five-hundred-dollar prize in each category.
Aside from the cash prize, Quiddity will also arrange to promote the winning trailers in the journal and on National Public Radio member station WUIS Springfield, as well as on the Web sites of both. The journal's prose editor David Logan and emerging novelist A. D. Carson will judge.
Authors should submit films of no longer than three minutes in the manuscript category, and publishers or presses should submit entries for published books; entry is free. Complete guidelines and entry forms are available on the Quiddity website.
Entries aren't due until December 10, but a look at Carson's sample trailer below might leave some writers wanting to carve out substantial time to get production just right, or assemble a crew—friends and colleagues are permitted to assist in the trailer's creation. Videos simply featuring authors reading do not qualify for this competition.
Next month Harper will publish Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, in which Carmela Ciuraru tells the stories of more than a dozen pseudonymous authors, including Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot, and explores the creative process and "the darker, often crippling aspects of fame."
The 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference was held from June 6 to June 12 and from June 13 to June 19 at the Vineyard Arts Project (VAP) campus in downtown Edgartown on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The conference featured weeklong seminars with daily workshops in poetry and fiction, as well as manuscript consultations, panel discussions, and readings. The faculty included poets Amelia Martens, Adrian Matejka, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Britton Shurley, and Keith Taylor; and fiction writers Tia Clark, John T.
Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference, 7 East Pasture Road, Aquinnah, MA 02535. (954) 242-2903. Alexander Weinstein, Director.
