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Writing fiction in the first-person plural is notoriously tricky. Challenge yourself to write a short story—or a section of a short story—from the first-person plural. Read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” for insight on how a collective narrator can enhance a story and/or produce unexpected effects.
The American Library Association awarded its inaugural Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Literature at a ceremony last night in Anaheim, California.
The organization that has for decades awarded the Caldecott and Newbery medals for children's and young adult literature is honoring for the first time books of fiction and nonfiction for adult readers.
Irish author and Man Booker alumna Anne Enright took the Carnegie Award in fiction for her fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz, published in the United States by Norton. Also shortlisted were Russell Banks for his twelfth novel, Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco), and Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell for her first, Swamplandia! (Knopf).
In nonfiction, Robert K. Massie's biography Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House) won the Carnegie Award. The late Manning Marable's much-lauded biography Malcolm X (Viking) and James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon) were also finalists.
Each winner, selected by a committee chaired by librarian Nancy Pearl, received five thousand dollars, and each finalist received fifteen hundred dollars. As with the Caldecott and Newbery medals, copies of the honored books will also be decorated with a seal announcing the award.
Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award went this year to debut novelist Anna Funder for her best-seller All That I Am (Harper). Funder, whose novel of the Nazi resistance in Europe also won her country's Independent Bookseller’s Award for debut fiction and was named Indie Book of the Year, received $50,000 Australian (approximately $50,355).
Funder is also the author of the Samuel Johnson Prize–winning nonfiction book Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, published by Granta Books in 2003, which the author wrote after making a shift from previous careers in international law and television production in Germany. Her award-winning debut novel also carries threads of the real, particularly stories of pre-World War II activists who opposed Hitler's rise to power, some culled from the author's personal relationship with a German refugee living in Australia.
The other contenders for this year's Miles Franklin Award are Blood by Tony Birch, Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears, Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse, and Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett. The award is given annually for a novel that "presents Australian life in any of its phases."
In the video below, Funder describes the challenges of shaping her novel, including the importance, while crafting fiction from historical events, of getting the story "morally right."
Check out German designer Marcel Schindler's stop-motion adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, set to the song "Sail" by Awolnation, that uniquely captures Santiago's epic struggle with the giant marlin.
New York City's Center for Fiction, which annually honors writers with its Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Clifton Fadiman Medal, is accepting entries for a new short story contest. One story will be selected to be published in the Literarian, the center's journal, and the winning author will receive one thousand dollars.
For the inaugural competition, stories of up to five thousand words may be submitted via e-mail by July 2. A fifteen dollar entry fee is payable via the center's online store.
The current issue of the Literarian features a story-as-slideshow by Roberta Allen, an essay by memoirist and fiction writer Esmeralda Santiago, a fiction translation from the Spanish of Raúl Ortega Alfonso excerpted from the Barcelona Review, and recommended reading from author Dan Chaon alongside stories by emerging writers. The magazine is accessible for free on the Center for Fiction website.
In the video below, featured in the latest issue of the Literarian, Joyce Carol Oates discusses the dream that gave life to her novel Mudwoman, published this past March by Ecco.
Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard's adaptation of the Tolstoy classic, starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Johnson, will be released in November.
In this video for Electric Literature's free fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, Sarah Bodil animates a sentence from "The Adventure of the Space Traveler" by Seth Fried, who was featured in last year's First Fiction Annual for this debut story collection, The Great Frustration.
Write a story in which the protagonist is "perfectly ordinary" (however you choose to define "ordinary") in every way except for one obvious trait. Follow how this one trait sets in motion the story’s central conflict or turn.
For lovers of Irish literature, and the work of James Joyce in particular, June 16 is a special day. Bloomsday is a celebration of the life of the Irish author on the day in which the events of his novel Ulysses (which stars Leopold Bloom, hence the name) is set. To commemorate the thirtieth annual observance, we present Adam Harvey's performance of pages 193 to 195 of Finnegans Wake.
Write a story that begins with a description of a distinct scent. Devote at least one paragraph to describing the smell, whether it’s the layered aroma of a well-cooked meal or something distressingly malodorous. Allow this opening description to lead you to a larger scene or a revelation about one of the story’s central characters.
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