Genre: Fiction

Story Prize Announces 2012 Judges

G&A: The Contest Blog
10.18.12

The Story Prize, an annual book award given for a short story collection, has announced its panel of judges for the 2012 awards. They are critic and writer Jane Ciabattari, author Yiyun Li, and bookseller Sarah McNally.

Jane Ciabattari is the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire (Canios Editions, 2002). Her reviews, interviews, and reportage have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, Bookforum, Salon, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among many others.

Sarah McNally founded McNally Jackson Books, New York City's largest independent bookstore, which she has owned and operated since 2004.

Yiyun Li is the author of the story collections Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House, 2010) and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005) and a novel, The Vagrants (Random House, 2009). A former MacArthur Foundation fellow, she has received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of its Best of Young American novelists, and in 2010, The New Yorker named her one of its top 20 fiction writers under 40. 

Judges for The Story Prize are selected from various literary fields, and have included writers, editors, booksellers, librarians, critics, journalists, and academics.

Founded in 2004 by director Larry Dark, the Story Prize is given for fiction collections published in the United States during the previous year. The winner receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $5,000. Past winners have included Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Mary Gordon, Patrick O'Keeffe, Jim Shepard, and Tobias Wolff. Last year, Steven Millhauser won the prize—edging out finalists Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman—for his collection We Others (Knopf, 2012).

The submission deadline for this year’s Story Prize is November 15. Finalists will be announced in January, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on March 13. For more information and up-to-date news, visit the Story Prize blog.

Louise Erdrich

Caption: 

In this clip from Prairie Public Broadcasting, author Louise Erdrich, who is profiled by contributing editor Kevin Nance in the current issue, talks about growing up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and the challenges of running an independent bookstore, then reads from her new novel, The Round House.

Genre: 
Fiction
Tags: 
Harper Perennial
Louise Erdrich
Prairie Public Broadcasting
Kevin Nance
November/December 2012
The Round House
Indigenous writers

Timeline

The Time Is Now
10.17.12

Choose one of your stories that needs revision. Create a timeline that includes each year of the main character's life, fleshing out details that support who he or she is. After you've finished, return to the story and revise it in terms of this more fully developed understanding you have of your main character.

Sehba Sarwar's Voices of the Displaced

Readings & Workshops Blog
10.15.12

October writer-in-residence Sehba Sarwar blogs about Voices of the Displaced, a workshop led by P&W-supported Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB). A writer and multidisciplinary artist, Sarwar uses her poetry, prose, and video/art installations to explore displacement and women’s issues on a domestic and global level. Her first novel, Black Wings, was published in 2004, and she is currently working on a second manuscript tentatively entitled "Island."

In the spring of 2003, I began co-facilitating a Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB) writing workshop with another Pakistani poet Shaista Parveen. At that time, VBB was still young—we were in our third year and I had recently quit working at a high school, where I had been teaching creative writing and journalism. I didn’t have much salary in those days and my only income was through workshops that VBB writers and I taught at local schools.

Though I had fun with teenagers, I wanted to work more with adults. So Shaista and I began planning a workshop that spoke to the rootless-ness we both felt, whether we were in Karachi, Houston, or somewhere else. Shaista and I dedicated much thought to our workshop title—just as VBB co-founders and I had spent time honing in on the right title for “our” organization three years earlier. We finally agreed on “Voices of the Displaced,” a title that rang true for us. It also attracted a pool of Houston-based writers who were born in other countries or elsewhere in the United States, who had come from communities of color, or identified themselves as GLBT/queer. Project Row Houses offered us a meeting space and co-sponsored the series. We sent out emails inviting people to join—VBB didn’t even have a website at that time. Our first group was intimate with only six participants, but over time, the group expanded. We always brought food and drinks and our gatherings offered formal writing but also a sense of community.

VBB’s Voices of the Displaced series lasted about two years, ending a few months before my daughter was born. But once the formal workshops ended, a group of us filled the void by forming a writing/performance group, Displaced Corps. For another year, we met weekly to write, critique each other’s work, and perform together.

Since that initial spurt of adult workshops and then subsequent break, VBB has gone back to offering writing workshops for educators and students. We also continue working on the issues we explored through Voices of the Displaced by producing theme-specific multidisciplinary shows such as Politiqueer, Artists/Mothers and What’s Color Got to Do With It?

Often I think about the title of our group and recognize that the feeling of “displacement” is true of communities not just in Houston but also in urban spaces around the world. To live in the same city as our grandparents, attend the same schools and colleges as our parents, or stay in the neighborhoods in which we were born is becoming rare. Human migration and movement makes the recording of memories and family stories precious and so much of VBB’s work continues to be focused on revisiting histories through different lenses, capturing neighborhood stories, and teaching workshops that create connections between the past, present, and the future.

Photo: Sehba Sarwar (right) with another workshop participant.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Chinese Author Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

G&A: The Contest Blog
10.11.12

Mo Yan, the Chinese author best known for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum, has received the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

After months of speculation, the announcement was made at a press conference in Stockholm early today by Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who described Mo Yan’s work as “hallucinatory realism,” and lauded the author for his stylistically unique and culturally important contributions to the international literary community. 

Mo Yan was born in 1955 to a farming family and raised in the rural Shandong Province of China, which serves as the setting for many of his novels and short stories. He grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and began writing while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981. Including Red Sorghum, which was published in English in 2003 by Viking and adapted for film by Zhang Yimou, Mo Yan is the author of ten novels, among them The Garlic Ballads (1988, published in English in 1995), The Republic of Wine (1992, published in English in 2000), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996, published in English in 2004), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006, published in English in 2008), and Sandalwood Death (2004, to be published in English in 2013), and more than eighty short stories. His most recent book, Wa, was published in Chinese in 2009.

Widely recognized for his pointed criticism of contemporary Chinese society, the author—whose given name is Guan Moye—adopted the pen name Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” to reflect the time in which he grew up, when citizens were unable to safely criticize those in power. “There is a very strong moral core in [his writing],” Englund said in an interview following the prize announcement. “It’s about ordinary people struggling—struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity—sometimes winning, but most of the time losing.”

One of China's most prolific and well-known writers, Mo Yan is celebrated not just for his engagement with Chinese history and politics, but also for his unique craft. “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said in a statement.

Mo Yan is only the second Chinese writer to receive the Nobel Prize, following novelist Gao Xingjian in 2000. Other recent recipients have included Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, Britain's Doris Lessing, France's Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio, Germany's Herta Muller, and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa. Last year, the prize went to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Speaking to the China News Service, Mo Yan said he was overjoyed to have won. “But I do not think that my winning can be seen as representing anything,” he said. “I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognized by the world.”

Administered annually since 1901 by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize is awarded internationally for outstanding achievements in literature, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace. Candidates for the prize in literature are invited to submit by the Nobel Committee, and recipients are selected by the eighteen-member Swedish Academy. Mo Yan will receive the prize, which includes a cash award and medal, on December 10 in Stockholm.

 

The $100,000 Dust Jacket

Caption: 

As explained in this clip from AbeBooks, a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby sold for $182,000 at auction in 2009, and the reason it fetched such a high price was the presence of its dust jacket. A first edition of the novel without a dust jacket could sell for anywhere between two thousand and eight thousand dollars, depending on its condition.

Genre: 
Fiction
Tags: 
AbeBooks
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Answer the Question

The Time Is Now
10.10.12

Buy yourself five postcards. Write one question on each postcard and send them to yourself every other day. When you receive the postcard, write for twenty minutes, responding to the question. Use these responses as the ingredients for a story.

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