Thursday, December 31, 2009

Kindle


The fifty most inspiring authors, how the winter’s biggest books got started, our fifth annual debut poets roundup, five writers who practice other arts, and the psychology of writer’s block.

Evan Kennedy is the author of Us Them Poems (BookThug).He runs Dirty Swan Projects.

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A hem heralds fissures, diffuse threats. Of stillness, I swam in flocks, and coated. In Vs rise swelling marks. Of instigation, of of.

Mark another tally on lack lust crumple, ripen solace. For gauged polis, athletes flaxen, greasing crossings crowed. Accented and sloped along, better miners a glossy rave querulous. Diagonals fizzle and raise foul lines. A rotation taken to tongue, of viewers sunning central.

Among carriages sucked along, blithenesses swap places. Traffic mode yieldings, their chests bared to vanillas.

Dear Friend of Poets.org,

Happy New Year! Before you ring in 2010, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Academy of American Poets to keep Poets.org ringing well into next year.

We love to provide you with new poetry, essays, poet bios, audio, and video for free, and it's the generosity of friends like you that help us pay for bandwidth, servers, staff, and all other expenses that a huge and popular site like Poets.org requires to function.

Plus, donations to the Academy are completely tax deductible. Don't miss this 11th-hour opportunity to receive a tax deduction for 2009. Please send a little holiday cheer in support of poets and poetry, then let's all raise a toast to a new decade!

All of us at the Academy of American Poets wish you a happy and healthy 2010.

Yours truly,


Tree Swenson
Executive Director

Academy of American Poets
584 Broadway, Suite 604
New York, NY 10012
212-274-0343
academy@poets.org


A quick word from fellow reader Gina PK...


Dry, <span class=

Wow! What an amazing piece of non-fiction. This book takes you right into the mind of an alcoholic. It is written with both humor and honesty. I couldn't put it down!

Saturday, December 26, 2009


Featuring stories selected from thousands published in literary magazines, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 is studded with great writers such as Junot Díaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and Paul Theroux, as well as new voices. The winning stories feature locales as diverse as post-war Vietnam, a retirement community in Cape Town, South Africa, an Egyptian desert village, and a permanently darkened New York City; the dizzying range of characters include a Russian mail-order bride in Finland, a rebellious Dominican girl in New Jersey, and a hallucinating British Gulf War veteran. The stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the twenty winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.

table of contents

Introduction • Laura Furman, Series Editor

•Graham Joyce,“An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen”
•Kristen Sundberg Lunstrum, “The Nursery”
•E. V. Slate, “Purple Bamboo Park”
•John Burnside, “The Bell Ringer”
•Mohan Sikka, “Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress”
•L. E. Miller, “Kind”
•Alistair Morgan, “Icebergs”
•Roger Nash, “The Camera and the Cobra”
•Manuel Muñoz, “Tell Him about Brother John”
•Caitlin Horrocks,“This Is Not Your City”
•Ha Jin,“The House behind a Weeping Cherry”
•Paul Theroux, “Twenty-two Stories”
•Judy Troy,“The Order of Things”
•Nadine Gordimer, “A Beneficiary”
•Viet Dinh, “Substitutes”
•Karen Brown, “Isabel’s Daughter”
•Marisa Silver,“The Visitor”
•Paul Yoon, “And We Will Be Here”
•Andrew Sean Greer, “Darkness”
•Junot Díaz, “Wildwood”

Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009
The Jurors on Their Favorites
A. S. Byatt on “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” by Graham Joyce
Anthony Doerr on “Wildwood” by Junot Díaz
Tim O’Brien on “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” by Graham Joyce

Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009
The Writers on Their Work

Recommended Stories 2009
Publications Submitted
Permissions

Book Twenty-Four
Review:
I am always skeptical when reading the "best" of any genre of writing. Sometimes I think my expectations are too high and sometimes I am pleasantly surprised at just how good the story telling really is. This edition of "The Best Stories of the Year" fell short for me. I'm not really sure why, only that I may have expected more, especially from some of the well known authors that were selected. Maybe I just do not like people telling me what is the best or worst of writing and I like to judge for myself.


Book Twenty-Three
Review:
If you love trivia, tests, quizzes and think you know everything there is to know about books and authors, I dare you to try your hand at this read. You will be surprised and fascinated by the facts and inspired to visit books and authors you may not have ever thought of before. A must have for the book lover in all of us.

From Homer to Harry Potter, from Chaucer to Charlotte's Web, a compelling book of quizzes on history's most influential literary works and writers
  • Did a whale named "Mocha Dick" inspire Melville's masterpiece?
  • Who was the first poet to speak at a presidential inauguration?
  • Which French-speaking high school football star shook up the literary world?

Do you freeze when someone mentions Faulkner? When the conversation turns to the Odyssey, do you want to take a hike? Have no fear. For years, Kenneth C. Davis's New York Times bestselling Don't Know Much About® books have enlightened and enthralled us with a winning blend of fascinating facts and wonderfully irreverent fun. Now he sets his sights on our literary IQ in Don't Know Much About® Literature. With this rich treasure trove of knowledge and intriguing information about the world's great books and authors, Kenneth Davis and his daughter, Jenny, demystify Dracula, capture Kafka, and help you brush up on your BrontË in the inimitable and endlessly entertaining Don't Know Much About® style. (from back book jacket)

Kenneth C. Davis is the best-selling author of Don't Know Much About History, which spent 35 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold nearly 1.5 million copies, and gave rise to his phenomenal Don't Know Much About® series for adults and children. Davis appears frequently in the media, has spoken at the Smithsonian Museum and American Museum of Natural History, and has written for the New York Times and Newsday, among other publications. He has also contributed to NPR's All Things Considered. He lives in New York City and Dorset, Vermont.


A Trio of Shorts from Aaron Burch's forthcoming chapbook

How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself Anew

How To

Grow antlers. Focus, visualize. Apply a balm or lotion to the base. Prepare for the added weight but be ready to adjust. It never happens or feels quite as you'd expect, nor all at once. Balancing can be tricky, like learning to walk all over again for the first time. Be proud. Stand straight, or as straight as possible. Knock them around a little, rough them up. Rub them on trees, the walls of your bedroom. Be proud. Exude pride. Feel at home, finally, as yourself.


How To

Make yourself like a piece of paper: crease, fold corner to corner, half, quarter. Tuck piece A into newly-created slot B. Begin to recognize the reproduction of yourself. Pull tight like you barely, but perfectly, fit. Slide into yourself like a glove. Like a mitt. Remember the first baseman's glove you got as a present in fourth grade, though you wanted to play third base. How you'd worn that glove always, tried to make it a part of you. How your hand had been most comfortable under that mitt, something secured in its webbing: a baseball; your other hand, made into fist, clapping into it; collected and balled-up paper. Wrap around yourself like that, like the baseball in the first baseman's mitt for the final out. Fold in tight and small, like a paper crane's origami heart.

Work

On bring-your-kid-to-work day, I stare at my computer, my cubicle walls. I remember going to work with my dad when I was little-on days off from school or special occasions when my parents would write me a note. He'd drive me around the city in his truck, introduce me to everyone he knew and worked with. Everyone seemed to love him; they grew big smiles as soon as they saw him approaching. It made me proud. Some days, he had to go to the dump and those trips were my favorite-watching the truck bed lift as he pushed a button, helping sweep out what didn't fall. The big hills of trash that seemed like magic. I don't travel, don't even get up and walk around much. There's nothing magical like the dump.

Aaron Burch has had stories appear in New York Tyrant, Barrelhouse, Another Chicago Magazine, and Quick Fiction, among others, and a full-length collection of short shorts,How to Predict the Weather, is forthcoming from Keyhole Books. He is the editor of Hobart.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Age of Wire and StringfathercostumeAnchor Book of New American Short StoriesNotable American Women



His work has appeared in Grand Street, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

*I heard Russell Banks read @ the Brooklyn Book Festival this past Fall and was amazed by him. Run out and pick up anything by this author, you will not be disappointed.

Russell Banks is president of the Cities of Refuge North America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 20 languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He lives in upstate New York.

A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

*Great gift idea for the reader and writer in all of us.


Reading Like a Writer

By

Reading Like a Writer By Francine Prose
Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.



"Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float"


OPHELIA-409.jpg

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Please Step Back


The Foxxes were a popular Bay Area rock and soul band led by the Rock Foxx (born Robert Franklin). The group made its name in the late sixties with a pair of ebullient anthems, ‘Make It Better’ and ‘We All Need a Place in the Sun.’ ” So reads an encyclopedia of rock and roll owned by Franklin’s estranged wife in this fictional history of the Foxxes’ ascent to psychedelic superstardom. Alternating between her perspectives and Franklin’s, Greenman maintains a playful and elastic style, as if every line had come from a Foxxes song. Pauses are not just pregnant; they are “carrying twins.” As the band becomes embroiled in drug culture and the marriage starts to dissolve, we are reminded that “you can only paint the town red so many times before you begin to bleed.” From The New Yorker ©2008


Absurdistan: A Novel



From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country. Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,” according to The New York Observer.
In Absurdistan, he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes.

The Unknown Knowns
A Novel

The Unknown Knowns


Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth, the man is a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security. What follows is a riveting story of two quixotic men who stalk each other toward a bloody showdown -- a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an aging water park.

The Unknown Knowns -- its title is a reference to a quote from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- is a brilliant send-up of the insidious language and sometimes tragically comic focus of our country's Homeland Security Department. Combining the social satire of Kurt Vonnegut with the paranoid delusions of Thomas Pynchon, Rotter takes everyday domestic fixations and turns them into a hilarious assessment of the human condition. Fresh, imaginative, and deft, The Unknown Knowns marks the arrival of a unique new voice in literary fiction.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Write-a-Thon for Dzanc Books

This is a reminder as a) there is now have a link on the Dzanc website for the event, and b) a ton of new EWN members were added to the email list right after this was sent out the first time around, and c) the write-a-thon officially begins tomorrow.

A HUGE thank you to those of you that have responded to this already.

I want to remind you to a
Dzanc Books' project coming up and hope that you might find the program worth participating in - our second annual Write-a-Thon. Last year we had a few dozen writers participate, saw a few of the pieces written get published, raised over $7000, and had one writer create a video showing her own participatory process.
.
As you may know, Dzanc Books is a non-profit organization, established to not only
publish great books, but to work nationally in set communities to provide writing workshops and year round programs for students and adults alike. These programs include our Dzanc Writer in Residency Programs, The Dzanc Prize, the Dzanc Creative Writing Sesions, author readings, single session and weekly session workshops which function in a slightly different capacity than our year-round DWIRPS.

With the economy still not up to speed, traditional means of raising funds - writing grants, corporate sponsorships, etc. - have become less successful. Here at Dzanc, we like to try and make raising money both as fun, and valuable, an experience as possible. With this in mind, last year we came up with an alternative and interactive plan which we believed not only furthered our mission but was something those participating in would enjoy. Based on the feedback we received, we were right.
If it sounds like something you'd like to participate in, please email us at info@dzancbooks.org.

DZANC BOOKS WRITE-A-THON

The link to this year's write-a-thon can be found
here.

The idea behind the write-a-thon will be similar to bowl-a-thons, or walk-a-thons, or, well you get the picture - other a-thons that you've probably supported or participated in during your lifetime, only with writing being the catalyst to the raising of funds. For one day, people will volunteer to write to help raise money, and they will ask people to fill out a donation sheet to support their efforts.

For volunteers

1. Thursday, December 17 thorugh Sunday December 20, 2009.
Last year we ran the write-a-thon on a single day and many authors were upset that they already had unbreakable plans for that date. This way if an author are available on any, or all, of the four dates, they can participate.
These will be the dates that those helping out Dzanc Books by raising money will be writing. Again I'm asking that you authors out there please consider being one of those that help us raise money that day. If you are interested, please email us at info@dzancbooks.org.

2. Dzanc Books will provide a donation request email for those authors participating.

3. Your sponsors will be able to make donation pledges through our
website via Paypal, or if they prefer to donate by check, an address will be provided. We will provide the sponsors with a tax receipt immediately this year - last year we used a mass emailing method after the event was over, and heard from some people well after the fact that they did not receive that email, so we will not use that same plan this year.

4. The mornings of the 17th through the 20th, we will send out a prompt or topic, and will post it on our website. Writers will then spend the day writing stories, or poems, or essays, using that prompt or topic (this will give those sponsoring an understanding that the work done was all done on during the write-a-thon dates).

5. Those donating will be sent proof of your participation via email. We will send out the proof of participation notices beginning on Monday the 21st.

Our goal for this event, considering there are over 2000 writers in the
Emerging Writers Network, is $20,000, or, an average of $10 raised per person. To put this in a proper context, that would pay for just under 3 full Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs, or the Dzanc Prize plus approximately 2 full DWIRPs. We will obviously be thrilled to find out after the fact that we were shortchanging ourselves with that goal. We do hope each and every member of EWN, and those who have become fans of Dzanc, will participate in our inaugural Write-A-Thon.

Your support means everything to us. We at Dzanc are truly trying to make a contribution through our charity programs and the works we publish, and while we are dedicated and diligent and will not fail in our intent, without your support, our efforts become increasingly difficult. We thank you in advance for joining us in our Write-A-Thon and your continual support of our programs and authors.

Again, for those that wish to participate, or those who wish to donate but do not know of any writers that will be participating, please contact us at
info@dzancbooks.org. Dzanc Books will also be giving a set of our Dzanc 2009 titles (from Mike Czyzniejewski's story collection through Laura van den Berg's collection) to the writer that raises the most money.

Thank you,

Dan Wickett
EWN/Dzanc Books

The 2010 Full Presse Subscription from Ugly Duckling Presse

One of China’s leading internet poets

poetrybio121509.jpg

Albania

by Yang Li translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, December 2009

Back in our day there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know Albania
who didn’t know it was the bright light of European Socialism
or that the other bright light was us. Back then
from Beijing to Tirana, we could all singA bosom friend afar brings distance near... It wasn’t till much later that
I learned these words were by Wang Bo of the Tang.
He died a long time ago and was never in Tirana.
I doubt he’d ever heard of the place, much less that it was very, very small.
A pal of ours named Wei Guo once said to us rather cryptically: all
Albania is just like the little upstart kingdom of Yelang.
I remember, I swear: it was the summer of ’74.
We had just turned 12 and thought what he’d said outrageously reactionary.

Yang Li is one of China’s most prominent internet poets. A founding member of the Sichuan-based “Not-Not” Poetic Project, Yang Li has since forged a style all his own. Among his print publications is Canlan or Splendor, a 623-page tell-all chronicle of the avant-garde poetry scene in China during the closing decades of the last century.

Steve Bradbury’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Jacket Magazine, Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Tinfish, and elsewhere. He has published three volumes of poetry in translation, most recently, Feelings Above Sea Level: Prose Poems from the Chinese of Shang Qin. He lives in Taipei, where he edits Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry, translation and the arts.

Innovations in Reading Prize, 2010

Each year, the National Book Foundation awards a number of prizes of up to $2,500 each to individuals and institutions--or partnerships between the two--that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading.