Jump to navigation Skip to content
The trailer for Are You My Mother? offers a glimpse into Alison Bechdel's fascinating "metabook," published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in which she investigates her mother's life in search of clues about the mother-daughter gulf. For a closer look, check out this issue's installment of The Written Image.
Write a piece of flash fiction or a short story that starts with an advice column. Use the advice column to introduce the story's protagonist, the central drama, or the back story of the characters. Alternatively, read through advice columns such as the Rumpus's Dear Sugar and Salon's Since You Asked and create a story based on the problem posed by one advice-seeker.
Prairie Lights Bookstore opened its doors in 1978 as a small, intimate bookshop, and since then, it has grown to become a literary institution in Iowa City. Today the bookstore occupies three and a half floors, part of which serves as the coffeehouse Times Club. Prairie Lights, in conjunction with the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hosts frequent readings and author events with visiting writers from around the world.
The trailer for Patrick Somerville's second novel, This Bright River, forthcoming in late June from Regan Arthur Books, will likely strike a chord with anyone who grew up in the pre-Internet age playing text adventures such as Zork (which also factors into the back story of one of the new novel's main characters, Ben Hanson). "I hoped that the 'user'—as well as the viewer—would be a little creeped out, but also intrigued," Somerville says. Mission accomplished.
Write a story that begins like this: On the morning Bill Somers shot his dog, I was...
The Believer's May issue has arrived, and with it, the announcement of the magazine's literary awards for books of poetry and fiction published in 2011. The honors are given annually for poetry collections deemed by the magazine's editors to be "the finest and most deserving of greater recognition" and novels and short story collections that are the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year."
Massachusetts poet Heather Christle takes the second annual Believer Poetry Award for The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), her "casually incandescent second collection." (Her third book, What Is Amazing, was released by Wesleyan University Press this past February.)
Author of three poetry collections himself, New York City author Ben Lerner receives the seventh annual Believer Book Award in fiction for his "hilarious and sensitive" debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press). The book, which made it onto a number of best-of lists last year, was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Young Lions Fiction Award given by the New York Public Library.
Along with the winner announcements, the Believer also released a list of the books most nominated for shout-outs in its readers survey. Coming out on top in poetry are Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), Dean Young's Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press), and Carl Phillips's Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. In fiction, readers' most frequent picks were The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown) by Chad Harbach, Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Knopf) by Karen Russell, and The Sisters Brothers (Ecco) by Patrick deWitt. The full account (summer reading list, anyone?) is posted on the Believer's website.
In the video below, Christle reads from her winning book at the Stain of Poetry reading series in New York City.
This work by Owen W. Lee is part of a project that aims to recode Shakespeare from a contemporary perspective. The skull represents a well-known tragic character, Ophelia in Hamlet, who is often used as a symbol of tragic death.
Started by husband-and-wife writers Stona and Ann Fitch, Concord Free Press is using a philanthropic publishing model to successfully distribute limited-edition books at no cost, upon request.
Organizers of writing contests are, perhaps not suprisingly, wary of publicizing details of their budgets, but the organizers of three contest programs offered to share the numbers behind their 2011 contests as part of contributing editor Michael Bourne's “The Economics of Competition,” which serves as the centerpiece of the current issue’s special section on the risks and rewards of writing contests.
What happens when you mix equal parts Don DeLillo and David Cronenberg, add an estimated budget of more than twenty million dollars, and stir vigorously? Cosmopolis, based on the 2003 novel and starring Robert Pattinson, Jay Baruchel, and Paul Giamatti, is an official selection at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
