Selected Shorts: Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer The wildly inventive Israeli master joins forces with the author of Everything is Illuminated to present an evening of surprising tales performed by Liev Schreiber (A View From The Bridge andEverything is Illuminated), Isaiah Sheffer and more. Symphony Space |
Monday, March 28, 2011
Our Friends at Symphony Space Invite You to Selected Shorts
National Poetry Month Ticket Giveaway
On March 31, come hear readings by Bei Dao and Rosanna Warren. "A Bei Dao poem feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness,” wrote Robert Hass. His most recent book isThe Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems. "Rosanna Warren lives in our tarnished, everyday, ramshackle world of loss, anguish, and sacrifice," wrote the late Anthony Hecht. "but she inhabits almost as vividly a realm of classic purity; and in some of her best, most moving poems she dwells in both regions at once, and within, as it seems, the same breath." Ms. Warren's new collection is Ghost in a Red Hat. Email us at unterberg@92Y.org-- the first five respondents to each offer will get free tickets. Please write "WARREN" or "NOTLEY" in your subject line, according to the reading you would like to attend. (Please do not hit "reply" to this e-mail, or send more than one e-mail. Please include your full name.) |
PEN World Voices Festival!- Apr 27 & 29
Revolutionaries in the Middle East Poetry: The Second Skin Do you hear the poetry in music and the music in poetry? Where does one begin and the other end? Experimental performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson curates and emcees an evening exploring the porous borders between poetry and music. The multimedia extravaganza will showcase Yusef Komunyakaa, John Burnside from Scotland, Ernesto Cardenal from Nicaragua,Hasina Gul from Pakistan, Agi Mishol from Israel, Joachim Sartorius from Germany, David-Dephy Gogibedashvili from Georgia, Andrzej Sosnowski from Poland and Pia Tafdrup from Denmark. Co-produced by the Poetry Society of America. Tickets: $20/15 PEN Members, student with valid I.D. To purchase, call 866.811.4111 or visit www.pen.org/Festival |
"Stop Killing Trees: How to Write for the Internet" with Libby Cudmore and Matthew Quinn Martin
Location: Ripley Grier Studios
131 West 72nd St.
New York, NY 10023
12pm - 2pm
Description:
Internet publishing is different than print. It is crucial for writers to learn how to adapt and to know which outlets are worth submitting to and which are a waste of time. The needs of these editors are specific and unique to the medium. In addition, agents are out there reading. How can you effectively use internet publication to develop a dynamic platform for your creative work? This workshop will help teach participants how to navigate the uncharted waters of internet publishing.
Workshop Leaders:
Libby Cudmore’s stories and essays have appeared in The MacGuffin, The Yalobusha Review, The Chaffey Review, The Southern Women’s Review, Sunsets and Silencers, Red Fez, Inertia, Xenith, Pop Matters, Pulp Pusher, The Midnight Diner (where she also serves as an editor), and the anthology Relationships and Other Stuff. She is a frequent contributor to Crime Factory, Shaking Like a Mountain, Battered Suitcase, Celebrities in Disgrace, Hardboiled, a Twist of Noir and Thrillers, and Killers ‘n’ Chillers, where her story “Unplanned” won a Bullet award in 2009 and was nominated for the 2010 Derringer award in flash fiction. Her work will also be featured in upcoming issues of Connotation Press, Needle, Criminal Class Press, Daily Love Stories, Mysterical-E, Fridge, and the anthology We’ll Always Have Chicago. She has taught writing for the past five years at both SUNY Cobleskill and Hartwick College. She has created and moderated panels at Stonecoast MFA USM and guest lectured at Albertus Magnus College.
Matthew Quinn Martin’s prose has been published in Transition, JMWW, Oddville Press, Eastern Standard Crime, Thuglit, MFA/MFU, The Midnight Diner (where he is also an editor), Aphelion, The Flash Fiction Offensive, and the anthologies Beat to a Pulp: Round One and Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror. He is also the writer of the feature film Slingshot (Weinstein Co.). For the past three years, he has taught writing, journalism and creative thought at Albertus Magnus College, has guest lectured at SUNY Cobleskill and Hartwick College and created/moderated panels for Stonecoast MFA USM.
Libby and Matthew are frequent guests on Jill Carey’s Telling Tales radio show on the Oneonta NPR affiliate. Their story “Call for Submission” was published in Big Pulp and they will be featuring in an upcoming issue of Arkham Tales. As collaborative educators they have presented at Indiana University's Graduate Student Writer's Conference, delivered a special lecture/workshop on writing crime at Hartwick College and received a grant from Poets and Writers to create and execute a entry level creative writing workshop in Oneonta, New York.
Click here to sign up for this workshop.
"Fiction Essentials: Creating a Voice" with Pamela Erens
Location: WORDS Bookstore
179 Maplewood Ave.
Maplewood, NJ 07040
10am-12pm
NOTE: This workshop will NOT take place on April 9, but on the following day, April 10.
Description:
This workshop will teach a key skill in the writing of successful fiction: the conscious creation of a voice or persona that is separate from the writer him/herself. Through examining excerpts of published fiction and doing brief in-class exercises, workshop participants will gain an awareness of the vast variety of persona possibilities available to them in both first and third person. They'll begin to discover the great freedom and pleasure that result from fashioning a successful voice.
Workshop Leaders:
Pamela Erens's novel, The Understory (Ironweed Press, 2007), was the winner of the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Pamela's short fiction has appeared in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Upstreet, Skidrow Penthouse, Redivider, and the short-story anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008). Pamela is a member of the Emerging Writers Network and PEN and is the recipient of two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships in fiction.
Click here to sign up for this workshop.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Tales of Lives Richly Lived, but True?
Thalia Book Club: Anna Karenina with Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt and Margot Livesey
Five Techniques for Good Craftsmanship
Proulx specializes in short stories, including “Brokeback Mountain,” though her masterpiece may be the novel The Shipping News. She didn’t begin writing until in her fifties and, as you’ll see, she doesn’t believe in rushing things.
Five Techniques for Good Craftsmanship
- Proceed slowly and take care.
- To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
- Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
- Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
- Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
From an article in The Guardian
Welcome to bookbook’s web-site
Formerly known as Biography Bookshop
We are located at 266 Bleecker Street between 6th & 7th Avenues in Greenwich Village
Telephone: 212-807-8655 or 212-807-0180
Memoir Manifesto by Deb Olin Unferth
2011 National Poetry Month Poster: "Bright objects hypnotize the mind"
My Reading Life
Crumb A documentary about the underground comix artist
April 12, 2011 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. TICKETS $15 Non-Members, $10 members, $7 students RSVP@societyillustrators.org or call Katie Blocher 212 838 2560
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Camel Ride, Los Angeles, 1986 by Porochista Khakpou
What is magical realism? How is it different than fantasy?
In magical realism the world appears much like our own, but also includes an element of the extraordinary. In Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has turned into a giant insect. In Stacey Richter’s “The Cavemen in the Hedges,” cavemen scurry in backyards, rummage through trash, and adore shiny objects. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Pelayo finds an angel with “huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked” in his courtyard after a rainstorm. Still, the extraordinary is firmly rooted in the ordinary. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is populated with human characters, such as Pelayo’s feverish newborn and the local priest, Father Gonzaga. And the story is anchored in details the reader recognizes from her own reality: rain, sea and sky, a chicken coop.
In The Fragrance of Guava, Garcia Marquez argues that strictly realistic literature can be “too static and exclusive a vision of reality.” Though it stretches the bounds of reality, magical realism acknowledges that magic is inherent in our day-to-day life. For example, in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mauricio Babilonia is always followed by a fluttering of yellow butterflies. This is a fantastic detail, yet it is based in reality. In an interview with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Garcia Marquez shares this anecdote:
When I was about five, one day an electrician came to our house in Aracataca to change the meter . . . On one of these occasions, I found my grandmother trying to shoo away a butterfly with a duster, saying, 'Whenever this man comes to the house, that yellow butterfly follows him.' That was Mauricio Babilonia in embryo.
Garcia Marquez exaggerates this occurrence in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but he’s also highlighting the very real kind of magic that exists in our daily lives.
Fantasy is very different. While magical realism situates readers in a predominantly realistic world, fantasy takes place in an unreal world with unreal characters. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a popular example of fantasy. The trilogy’s characters include Hobbits, who are little people with big feet, as well as Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, Ents, and Wizards. It also features a ring that bestows power but corrupts those who possess it. Fantasy creates different places and species, ones that exist outside of our world. While magical realism stays grounded in our own reality, fantasy breaks free of it.
Our writing expert is Gotham teacher, Brandi Reissenweber. Email your questions to WritingQuestions – at – WriterMag.com. This piece originally appeared in the Ask the Writer column on the website for The Writer magazine. See more advice from our expert.
Dzanc Day |
On Saturday, April 9, 2011, Dzanc Books will hold its second annual National Workshop Day, better known as Dzanc Day.Consisting of dozens of creative writing workshops in almost as many cities, Dzanc Day provides local, affordable two-to-four hour sessions led by professional writers, authors, and editors, all open to attendance by the public for a very affordable fee. Sessions are conducted in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and are generally suitable for writers of all levels. Information about individual locations and session descriptions can be found by browsing either the map or the list of states at the website.
In addition to being a great way for participants to receive instruction, get inspired, and meet other local writers, Dzanc Day also helps to partially fund our many charitable endeavors, including the Dzanc Prize, which recognizes one writer annually for both literary excellence and service to his or her community, and our Writer in Residence Program, which places professional writers into classrooms to provide creative writing instructions to public school students who could not otherwise afford the opportunity. It's thanks to our workshop leaders' generous donations of their time and talents that we're able to continue to support and grow these programs, and your signing up for Dzanc Day will ensure their success in the future.
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A Norton Guide to Fiction and Nonfiction
Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be: Where to Start
Saturday, March 26, 2011
“To the Tyrants of the World” by Abul-Qasim Al Shabi
ألا أيها الظالم المستبد
حبيب الظلام عدو الحياه
سخرت بأنات شعب ضعيف
و كفك مخضوبة من دماه
و سرت تشوه سحر الوجود
و تبذر شوك الاسى في رباه
رويدك لا يخدعنك الربيع
و صحو الفضاء و ضوء الصباح
ففي الافق الرحب هول الظلام و قصف الرعود و عصف الرياح
حذار فتحت الرماد اللهيب
و من يبذر الشوك يجن الجراح
تأمل هنالك انى حصدت رؤوس الورى و زهور الأمل
و رويت بالدم قلب التراب اشربته الدمع حتى ثمل
سيجرفك سيل الدماء
و يأكلك العاصف المشتعل
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Press Release |
JASON OCKERT WINS 2010 DZANC SHORT STORY COLLECTION CONTEST
February 16, 2011, Ann Arbor, MI--Dzanc Books is pleased to announce that Jason Ockert, Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University, is the winner of our short story collection contest. Ockert's manuscript, Neighbors of Nothing, was selected from nearly 300 submissions. This collection will be published in October 2013.
Steve Gillis, Co-Founder and Publisher of Dzanc Books, notes: "Jason Ockert spins tales that synthesize all the best particles of great story telling. His collection is filled with mystery, poetry, pain and passion, fused throughout with humor and elements of what makes his every character completely human. There is also a strong sense of locale in Neighbors of Nothing, the feeling that we have all been here before. Though the settings are oddly off the map and out of this world, it is a world which brings great joy to read and we at Dzanc are honored to name Jason Ockert as the winner of our 2010 Short Story Collection Contest and look forward to publishing his masterful work." Jason's response upon hearing that his collection had been selected: "This is humbling news. What a privilege to see my collection added to Dzanc's fine publishing list."
The short list of finalists also included collections from Matthew Derby, Rebecca Kanner, Evan Lavender-Smith, Ben Miller, August Tarrier, Anne Valente, Corinna Vallianatos, and Tom Whalen.
ABOUT JASON OCKERT
Jason Ockert has won several national fiction awards and is the author of the short story collection Rabbit Punches. His stories have appeared in many journals, including the OxfordAmerican, Witness, Ecotone, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, McSweeney's, and The Iowa Review. His work is included in the anthologies New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories. He teaches in the English Department at Coastal Carolina University.
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Press Release |
DZANC BOOKS TO PUBLISH GEORGE SINGLETON
March 7, 2011 - Ann Arbor, MI-Dzanc Books is proud to announce that it will publish a collection of stories by George Singleton in fall 2013, entitled Stray Decorum. George Singleton has previously published four collections of stories (These People Are Us, the Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel), two novels (Novel, Work Shirts for Madmen), and a book on writing advice (Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds). His work has also appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, Zoetrope, Oxford American, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Epoch, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Food Writing and ten editions of New Stories from the South.
George, currently a teacher of creative writing at the South Caroline Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, has seen his work widely acclaimed. Recently he has seen work about his writing in Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today. Additionally, William Giraldi published "A Holy Impropriety: The Stories of George Singleton" in theGeorgia Review's Winter 2010 issue. George recently won the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from The Fellowship of Southern Writers. He lives in South Carolina and has done so since the age of seven minus a quick jaunt to graduate school. George is represented by Christina Ward of the Ward & Balkin Agency.
"Having really enjoyed George's previous titles," Dan Wickett said, "we are thrilled at the opportunity to bring his latest collection of stories to the reading public. The addition of Stray Decorum to what we felt was an already strong 2013 catalogue, and to add somebody of George's stature to Dzanc's growing roster of extremely talented authors, is really exciting. His writing is one-of-a-kind and this collection will only continue to elevate his reputation as one of the funniest writers around." |
2011 Eat, Drink & Be Literary: Dinner & a Reading at BAMcafe
Jennifer Egan has published short stories in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and McSweeney's. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, came out in 1995 and was released as a movie starring Cameron Diaz in 2001. Her second novel, Look at Me, was a National Book Award finalist in 2001, and her third, The Keep, was a national bestseller. Her latest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won critical acclaim “as a brilliant, all-absorbing novel” (All Things Considered). Also a journalist, Egan has written many cover stories for The New York Times Magazine on topics ranging from young fashion models to the secret online lives of closeted gay teens. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.
"Fair Play" by Tove Jansson, introduction by Ali Smith, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
Kristen Kosmas and Jeremy Hoevenaar
Fri Mar 25, 10:00 PM
at The Poetry Project @ St. Mark’s, 131 E. 10th St. (&2nd Ave.), New York, NY