Monday, March 28, 2011

Our Friends at Symphony Space Invite You to Selected Shorts

Selected Shorts: Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer
Wed, Apr 6 at 7 pm

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
Broadway at 95th Street
$27; Member $23; 30 & Under $15

Buy Tickets

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.

Join us on
April 7 for a reading by Alice Notley, who will read from her new collection,Culture of One. It’s her first appearance at the Poetry Center. "The nature Alice Notley most loves is human nature," wrote Marie Ponsot. "Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use." Ms. Notley will be introduced by Ron Padgett.

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
With Rula Jebreal, Ghassan Salamé, Abdelkader Benali and others
Wed, Apr 27, 7:30 pm

How did social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution in the Middle East? In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy and at what costs? Listen to the formidable former Lebanese Minister of Culture, Ghassan Salamé; Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal; Moroccan-Dutch writer Abdelkader Benali; and on-the-ground bloggers tackle these urgent questions.

Poetry: The Second Skin
With Laurie Anderson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ernesto Cardenal and others
Fri, Apr 30, 7:30 pm

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

30 Ways to Celebrate Poetry

Visit Poets.org to find out a new way to


"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 T
ransition, 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?

“The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives” runs through May 22 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

Oprah.com

Thalia Book Club: Anna Karenina with Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt and Margot Livesey

Novelists Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad), Hustvedt (The Sorrows of an American) and Livesey (The House on Fortune Street)-the trio that broughtMiddlemarch and Jane Eyre to life at this book club-are back by popular demand to revisit Tolstoy's classic. An excerpt from the novel will be performed by Amy Ryan (The Office, In Treatment).

Five Techniques for Good Craftsmanship

Annie Proulx writes literary fiction brilliant enough to win major accolades (Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.) and accessible enough to win a wide audience.

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
  1. Proceed slowly and take care.
  2. To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
  3. Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
  4. Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
  5. 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

The writers I chose each explore memoir in a decidedly contemporary manner, while at the same time showing an understanding of the past tradition.

Click here to read the whole article.

Unferth-575.jpg

Memoir madness is back by popular demand!

Celebrity Autobiography

2011 National Poetry Month Poster: "Bright objects hypnotize the mind"

Download a PDF version of the poster, or request one for your school, bookstore, library or community center.

My Reading Life

"Pat Conroy doesn't just love books, he devours them. He doesn't just visit libraries and bookstores, he inhabits them. He doesn't enjoy language, he revels in it. . . . [My Reading Life] is a rich, unabashedly self-critical and moving tribute to a writer's passion. . . . Like Stephen King did in his remarkable On Writing, Conroy reminds us of his considerable talents for telling a story and arranging words." —Associated Press

My Reading Life

Exercise on Point-of-View by Elizabeth Strout

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


MAUREEN THORSON: Applies to Oranges

Applies to Oranges

Camel Ride, Los Angeles, 1986 by Porochista Khakpou

I loved this country with the lukewarm, watery, neither-here-nor-there love that you bestow upon any country when it’s the only country you know. I accepted it and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

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.

A Norton Guide to Fiction and Nonfiction

In The Making of a Story, writer and seasoned creative writing teacher Alice LaPlante compiles fifteen years of her expertise, exercises, and examples in a primer for creative writers on the art of fiction and nonfiction.

"Comprehensive in its coverage of inspiration, craft, aesthetics, veracity, and purpose, this one-stop guide to writing is casual in tone and rigorous in content, elucidating the nature of fiction and nonfiction and clarifying the qualities unique to each and common to both. Each chapter contains an explication of such subjects as point of view, creating characters, and narrative structure; writing exercises, and an illustrative story by the likes of Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore, John Cheever, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Expansive, clear, and sophisticated, LaPlante's richly resourced guide is destined to become a standard."—Booklist

Paterson: Book III and Selected Poems

Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be: Where to Start

By Anne Lamott
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren't? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?

Click here to read more of this article.

Brian Cronin illustration

Saturday, March 26, 2011

From Page to Stage

Walt Whitman Ruled Notebook

Just another contest

Excerpt from "Peace from Broken Pieces"

Iyanla Vanzant's Peace from Broken Pieces

“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

Who: David Foster Wallace
When: April 15th
Why: Also appearing in his own (posthumously-published) novel, David Foster Wallace arrives for work at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Regional Examination Center where employees receive boredom-survival training. A little joke: releasing the book on April 15th.

5 Feminist Classics to (Re)read as a Mom, Wife and Writer

Reading Women

How to Beard Yourself Like Brian Wilson poster Jon Adams

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.

The 2011 Collagist Chapbook Contest

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
Moderated by Deborah Treisman

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.

David Unger

available in bookstores April 5th.

The Price of Escape
“[Book groups] would be well advised to bypass the best-sellers in front of
bookstores and libraries and pick up this clever (and useful) reading guide.
This book’s authors have an eye for offbeat and unappreciated classics […
and] taste that spans the highbrow-lowbrow cultural divide.”
--Chicago Tribune

"Fair Play" by Tove Jansson, introduction by Ali Smith, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal


Fair Play cover

Fairness and playfulness are at the heart of this delightful novel, which chronicles in 17 luminous snapshots a shared artistic life…. Jansson has a knack for packing a good deal of wit and wisdom into ostensibly simple tales. These deft and gentle stories are as refreshing as a dip in chilly Finnish seas.
The Guardian (London)

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

Hello Failure

Colm Tóibín



Brooklyn


There are no antagonists in this novel, no psychodramas, no angst. There is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself, learning to make and stand behind her choices, finding herself able to withstand hardship (a storm at sea or the death of a loved one), growing into the wisdom that fate will render all our choices irrelevant in the end. — Pam Houston

The Academy of American Poets will present its ninth annual benefit, Poetry & The Creative Mind, at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center in New York City

The Kitchen Daughter


The Kitchen Daughter

Description

After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna's soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, dead for twenty years, who appears with a cryptic warning ("do no let her…") before vanishing like steam from a cooling dish.


On Saturday, April 9, 2011, Dzanc Books will hold its second annual National Workshop Day, better known as Dzanc Day.

DD Map

Spring has sprung

Half a Life by Darin Strauss

"Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

Half a Life

Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading


During a recent semester spent studying abroad in the UK, I had the opportunity to take an undergraduate course on Henry James. I seized the chance, having never taken a class devoted to a single author before. Previously, Henry James had existed in my mind as a hazy legend in Anglo-American letters who wrote hefty novels and dense stories in an ominously opaque prose. The only thing I had ever read of his was “The Middle Years”, a short story about an aging writer resting in Bournemouth, who befriends a doctor who also happens to be a fervent admirer of his work. It sounds awfully boring but I was impressed by the story, which reveals a great deal about reader-writer relations, although of course I found the writing itself a little impenetrable at times (the number of commas in the first sentence alone would send a good number of readers packing). It’s easy to lose your way in a James story if you’re not careful. Your eyes keep scanning the words, but your thoughts tend to wander off. Often what’s literally happening is buried beneath endless looping sentences, words that lap like waves, eddies of thoughts and counter-thoughts. It all sounds beautiful, but the reader is left wondering: what does it actually mean?

Click here to read the whole article
cover