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In this blast from the past, School House Rock! presents "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here," which first aired in 1974 as part of the series of educational short films featuring music that, nearly forty years later, is still difficult to get out of one's mind. Remember "Conjunction Junction," which first aired in 1973? Who could forget?
The Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced yesterday, recognizing noteworthy Australian novels and the "efforts and sacrifices" of their writers.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard presented the award for fiction to New Zealand native Stephen Daisley, whose debut novel, Traitor, was released last year by Text Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Australia.
Daisley, who now lives in Perth, Australia, received eighty thousand Australian dollars (roughly eighty-six thousand U.S. dollars), an award which the fifty-six-year-old author says will help his family "survive a bit more." The author, who worked without publication for twenty years, told the Sydney Morning Herald that he persevered with his work because writing is his "bliss."
The shortlisted novelists were each awarded five thousand Australian dollars (about five thousand four hundred U.S. dollars). They are Roberta Lowing for Notorious (Allen & Unwin), Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran (Random House), David Musgrave for Glissando: A Melodrama (Sleepers Publishing), and Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance (Macmillan).
The German Haus der Kulturen der Welt has awarded its twenty-five-thousand-euro (roughly thirty-five-thousand-dollar) International Literature Award to Russian writer Mikhail Schischkin for his novel Venushaar (Maiden's Hair). The novel, which has won several awards in Russia but took seven years to make its way into translation in Germany—and remains untranslated in the United States—was selected for the prize from among over one hundred books translated from twenty-four languages and originating in fifty countries.
Among the finalists for the prize, which honors translations of books from any language into German, were Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat for the translation of her memoir Brother, I'm Dying, which was published by Knopf in the United States in 2007; Elias Khoury for Yalo, originally written in Arabic and released in English by Archipelago Books in 2008; and Mathias Énard for Zone, translated from the French and published last December in English by Open Letter. A list of all the finalists and their German publishers is available on the prize website.
The jury, comprised of editors, translators, critics, and authors, called Schischkin a "wordsmith of the highest order" who has "developed a unique form of novel" and "plays with
perspectives and settings, with the most diverse verbal registers and stylistic positions." His translator, Andreas Tretner of Berlin, who has been translating works from the Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian since the mid-eighties, was also praised for "finding a German lid for every Russian pot."
Think about an incident from your life—something especially monumental, unexpected, or traumatic that altered the way you see the world. Write a story or essay about it, but from someone else’s perspective. You can appear as a character in the story, but explore it from outside of yourself, as an event that happened, but not one that happened to you.
A Good Hard Look, Ann Napolitano's second novel, is a fictionalization of the last few years of Flannery O'Connor's life in Milledgeville, Georgia. In this clip, the author and her editor, Jenny Smith, discuss the book, which will be published this week by Penguin Press.
The Beginners, the debut novel by poet, Fence editor, and now novelist Rebecca Wolff, was published last month by Riverhead Books. The coming-of-age story of a girl in a New England town with a secret history is "as creepy as it is marvelous," according to Publishers Weekly.
A nearly seventy-year-old literary award that honored works in all genres by young, emerging writers is buckling under the pressure of budget woes. Booktrust, the organization that has for the past nine years sponsored the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, given since 1942 to writers under the age of thirty-five, announced earlier this week that government funding cuts forced it to revamp its program portfolio, shuttering the award—at least for 2011.
The prize, according to author Margaret Drabble, who won the award in 1966 and lamented its loss in the Guardian, is "one of the most romantic and distinguished of prizes," more so than the oldest major U.K. award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, or the Booker. The five-thousand-pound award (roughly eight thousand dollars) is given to writers "at the outset of their careers, when a sign of approval means much more than it does in their cynical, competitive, commercial later years."
The 2009 winner, Evie Wyld—who won for her novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (Pantheon)—says the award "gave me a platform to work off, and I'm not sure I'd be in the position I am in now, had the Rhys not brought such a large amount of attention with it," including radio appearances and articles. Among the other poets and prose writers who have taken the prize in the past are Angela Carter, Andrew Motion, V. S. Naipaul, and Jeanette Winterson.
Booktrust, which is pursuing alternate avenues for maintaining the prize, told the Guardian it hopes to bring the Rhys "back with a bang as soon as possible," possibly even in 2012.
In the video below, Wyld reads from her winning book, a "romantic thriller about men who aren't talking."
Open your medicine cabinet and choose something from it that one character will use to kill another in a story.
In this book trailer for Carolyn Parkhurst's novel The Nobodies Album, recently published in paperback by Anchor Books, the author introduces The Carolyn Parkhurst Collection.
Earlier this year actor James Franco and biographer Paul Mariani fielded questions at the Boston College premiere of The Broken Tower, a film directed by and starring Franco, based on Mariani's 1999 biography, The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane.
