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SNR Editor’s Blog SNR Editor’s Blog Blogging about Writers and Writing PEN Awards October 13, 2006 PEN USA Announces Awards PEN USA has announced its winners of its LIterary Awards competition: Fiction–Percival Everett’s Wounded, Creative Nonfiction–Michael Chorost’s Rebuilt: How becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, Research Nonfiction–Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in teh Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, Poetry–Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, Drama–Donald Freed’s Devil’s Advocate, Teleplay–Alex Tse’s Sucker Free City, and Geroge Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s Good Night, and Good Luck. At the awards dinner in December, the association will give its lifetime achievement award to Jame Smiley. Posted by snreview Filed in Writing 3 Comments » Pamuk Wins Nobel / Finalists for National Book Awards October 12, 2006 Pamuk Wins Nobel Recently on trial for offending the concept of Turkishness, novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel literature prize. Pamuk’s novels include the popular and critically acclaimed Snow and My Name is Red. Finalist for the National Book Awards Announced Here are the works and authors nominated for the National Book Awards: Fiction–Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, and Jesse Walter’s The Zero; Nonfiction–Rajiv Chandraswekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, and Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present; Poetry—H.L. Hix’s Chromatic, Ben Lerner’s Angel of Yaw, Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, and James McMichael’s Capacity. Posted by snreview Filed in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Orhan Pamuk, Poetry, Publishers, Writing 1 Comment » Desai Wins Booker, Novel in the Internet Age, Oates Insensitive October 11, 2006 Desai Wins Booker Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The Indian-born writer has a strong family tie with the prize. Her mother, Anita Desai has been shortlisted three times since 1980 but has never won. Kiran, who also wrote Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, is the first woman since 2000 to win the prize. Her competition included Kate Grenvillle’s The Secret River, M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch. Waters was the favorite of London’s bookies. You can read an extract of The Inheritance of Loss. You can also read an interview with Kiran in Critical Mass. Novel in the Internet Age Novelists Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart talk about the novel in the Internet Age. Kirn published a serialized novel in Slate. Kirn writes: “Can written narratives represent this world [the world of instant worldwide communication]? Can they convey what it feels like eot inhabit it.” J.C. Oates Insensitive That’s the claim from the College of New Jersey. The university was reacting to her short story that was published in the New Yorker. It was called Landfill, which is about a student forced down a trash chute and later found dead in a landfill. Posted by snreview Filed in Writing No Comments » Great British Novels October 8, 2006 Greatest Novels According to the Brits Following in the footsteps of the New York Times, the Guardian asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best novel to come out of the British Commonwealth between 1980 and 2005. Here are the results in order: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; Money by Martin Amis; Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and Atonement by Ian McEwan both tying for third, Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, Unconsoled by Kazuio Ishiguro, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Amongst Women by John McGahern tying for eighth, and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern. The publication also lists several of the other nominees. Posted by snreview Filed in Fiction No Comments » So What about Frost / Google’s Literacy Project / Who Needs Poetry / Fitch Talks / Young Poets October 6, 2006 Why the Flurry about Frost’s Poem? Jennifer Howard asks, “Why the hoopla about an unpublished Robert Frost poem?” In the past few weeks, bloggers and the media have made noise about the Virginia Quarterly Review publishing an unpublished Frost poem. The publication has an essay by Robert Stilling, who discovered the poem, and another by poet Glyn Maxwell. Howard notes that several scholars know the whereabouts of several unpublished Frost poems. Google’s Literacy Project Reuters reports that Google Inc. has a Web site dedicated to literacy. Google hopes that it will combat global illiteracy and bolster its own educational credentials. Meanwhile Google released the top 10 most viewed tests in English for a week in September. They include Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers by Peter K. Endress, Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms, Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk by Farnk J. Fabozzi, Steven Mann, and Moorad Choudhry, Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, The Holy Qur’an as translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006 by Thomson Peterson, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense by Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, and Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot by Brad Graham and Kathy McGowan. Who Needs Poetry? “It’s just what people need right now–a high dosage, intensive injection of lyricism, beauty, and passion.” So says John Burnside, poet, writer, and chair of the Forward prize for poetry. That’s the lead of Greig Watson report for the BBC. Then Jeff Gordinier writes for the poetryfoundation.org: “This poetry thing—it’s starting to worry me. The way some people talk about it, you’d think reading a poem every morning was like swallowing a capsule of cod liver oil: it sharpens your vision, expands your lungs, wards off the plague. It’s a psychic antitoxin. It reconnects you with the world around you. It’s good for you.” Fitch Talks Andrea Hoag interviews Janet Fitch about how she wrote White Oleander and her new novel Paint It Black. Politics & Poetry “Young poets today are casting aside the dreamy ‘hello trees, hello flowers’ bardic stereotype and choosing instead to tackle the hot political issues of the day–or so found the judges of the 2006 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award,” writes Michelle Pauli. Posted by snreview Filed in Fiction, Poetry, Publishers, Reading No Comments » Robertson Beats Heaney / Remembered Forever? / How-to Literature / Googling of Literature / Too Many Good Books / Finding Frost’s Poem / Novels and Poets October 5, 2006 Robertson Wins Forward Robin Robertson won the Forward Prize for Poetry, making him the first poet to win both best collection and best first collection prize. He won the best first collection for A Painted Field in 1997. His collection Swithering won the more recent award. Swithering beat out Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. Be Immortalized Irish writer Jason Johnson will auction off chances to become a character in his third novel at www.woundlikcer.com. Why is the 37-year-old holding the auction: For the money. How-to Literature In recent months, the book publishing industry, especially in England, has come out with a series of how-to literature books: How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How Novels Work by John Mullan, and Fifty Ways to Read a Poem by Ruth Padel. Googling of Literature During the past ten years, companies such as Yahoo and Google have altered the Internet environment, creating more access to more activities for the average computer user. With its book program along with the Gutenberg Project, the Open Content Alliance, and the Open Document Foundation, these two companies–along with many others–will dramatically alter how and what people read while providing wider access to original material for billions throughout the world. Too Many Good Books? “This fall, the largest number of new titles by brand-name authors in recent memory is hitting bookstores, adn the publishing world is asking itself an unusual question: Can there be too many good books?” That’s the start of Josh Getlin Los Angeles Times essay “Booked-up Publishers Could Be in a Bind.” More interestingly and not addressed is the question: Can there be too much good writing out there? Look at the number of new titles being published by literary imprints–small and large. Without an increase in the number of readers, aren’t we as writers and publishers just asking the same number of people to read more? Can the reader base expand? How Did He Find that Poem? Virigina Quarterly Review just published “War Thoughts at Home” by Robert Frost, which remained lost for decades. Graduate student Robert Stilling discovered it while doing research at the University of Virgina. Scott McLemee talks to Stilling about the discovery. Novels about Poets Colum McCann, author of Zoli which is about a Romani poet, pics the top 10 novels about poets: Stone by John Williams, My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, The Wing of Things by Sean O’Reilly, Shadow Box by Antonia Logue, Winslow in Love by Kevin Canty, Snow by Orham Pamuk, The Dog Fighter by Marc Bokanowski, and Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce. Posted by snreview Filed in Fiction, Poetry, Publishers, Writing 1 Comment » Pan Redux / Politically Incorrect Correctness? / Poems by Cohen / Hornby Talks As Does Amis and Rushdie October 1, 2006 Pan Redux? What gave Geraldine McCaughrean the nerve to write a sequel to Peter Pan? asks the Guardian. The Politically Correct Becomes Incorrect? Lionel Shrivere argues in The Australian that “fiction may be the last refuge of the outrageous, the last redoubt of Orwell’s thought crime. Moreover, even the freedom to be outrageous in fiction is under threat.” Her essay provokes thinking. In the West, we readily condemned nation’s for trying authors for violating “Turkishness.” She wonders if the attempt to embrace all people into a culture is not leading to a similar crime against the state of inclusion. Two Poems by Cohen The Guardian has published “The Cigarette Issue” and “Seisen is Dancing” by Leonard Cohen. Hornby Tells ‘All’ In an essay entitled “The Complete Polysyllabic Spree,” Erica Wagener interviews Nick Hornby. He says: “When I started being review, I thought, ‘Oh god, I really want to know if my book’s any good or not.’ I don’t read any of them any more, but when you read two people side-by-side and one of them is saying you’re a moron and the other is saying you’re a genius, you think: Okay, so now I’m being asked to choose whcih of tehse people is the cleverer. Because I’d kind of like to know the right answer. And then after a while you just give up.” Amis Lets It Rip–Yet Again In the last month, Martin Amis released two works about radical Islam. Guardian writer Rachel Cooke flies from London to the Hamptons on Long Island to interview the author. He, like Hornby, stopped reading reviews: “You’re minding your own business. Then you see the strap-line on the [Lodon] Times: ‘Martin Amis is Shit.’ So it’s a drive-by shooting.” Rushdie Interviewed James Campbell of the Guardian interviews Salman Rushdie. Posted by snreview Filed in Fiction, Orhan Pamuk, Poetry, Writing No Comments » ‘The Ode Less Travelled / The Bed Potato / Interview with Philip Deaver / Interview with Stephen King / Cohen Awards September 29, 2006 “The Ode Less Travelled” In his review of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, David Orr takes on Robin Williams’ version of the English teacher John Keating in the movie Dead Poets Society, as well as Dr. J. Evans Pritchard. “As Samuel Johnson put it more than 250 years ago, anyone attempting to discuss ‘the minuter parts of literature’ usually ends up either ‘frighting us with rugged science, or amusing us with empty sound.’” Then Orr tells how Fry does neither. The Bed Potato Attempting never to leave his bed, Gary Shteyngart reviews the new translation of Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. Goncharov’s hero lays in bed all day. On the third day, Shteyngart writes: “Today I will tackle Oblomov, the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel.” Interview with Philip Deaver Nancy Zafris, the Kenyon Review’s fiction editor, conducts an intriguing interview with Philip Deaver, who wrote Silent Retreats, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Deaver talks about craft. Read him talking about the influences on his writing: “Have you ever read John Updike’s “A Constellation of Events,” a little story buried down in his Trust Me collecdtion? The last lines kill me. Then there’s the Morrisons’ accident in Dan Chon’s “Among the Missing.” And Ann Beattie’s second swing past her mother’s house in “Find and Replace,” and her delicious little story “Waiting,” when the dog lazily comes out onto the front porch. Alice Dark’s “In the Gloaming”–those who’ve read it will remember the father saying to the mother, ‘Tell me about my son.’ Tobias Wolff’s “Powder,” Richard Ford’s “Reunion,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Carver’s “Cathedral” and “Errand.” I like these stories for the amazing moments they gave me. There are hundreds of others.” You also can read his story “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder.” PR Interview Stephen King In the fall issue of the Paris Review, Stephen King talks about fiction and his approaches: “I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, What are we afraid of as humans? Chaos. the outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that’s what I’m interested in. I mean: There are a lot of people whose writing I really love–one fo them is the American poet Philip Booth–who writes about ordinary life straight up, but I just can’t do that.” Cohen Awards The 2006 Cohen Awards for the best poem and short story in the previous year’s issues of Ploughshares were given to Laura Kasischke for story “If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane…” and R.T. Smith for his poem “Dar He.” Posted by snreview Filed in Writing 1 Comment » Penn Writers Conference September 29, 2006 Penn Writers Conference Susan Stranahan will give the keynote address at the Twelfth Annual Writers Conference at Penn. The program offers two days of two-hour workshops and master classes. To sign up for the conference go to www.pennwritersconference.org or call 215-898-6479 extension 3. SNR’s Joseph Conlin will conduct one of the workshops on Saturday, “Submitting to Literary Magazines.” Posted by snreview Filed in Writing No Comments » Poets Awarded / ‘New’ Frost Poem / Burnside on Non-Fiction September 28, 2006 Poets Awarded Carl Phillips recently received the Academy of American Poets’ Academy Fellowship, receiving $25,000. The academy selected the poet based on his work during the past 20 years. MacArthur Fellowship winner and Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University John Hollander will be the new Poet Laureate for Connecticut starting next year. The 76-year-old poet will succeed Maryilyn Nelson. The state pays $1000 a year for the position. Meanwhile the Poetry Foundation has named Jack Prelutsky as the First Children’s Poet Laureate, a $25,000 prize. Frost Poem Discovered The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) next week will publish a poetic tribute to a friend killed during The Great War by Robert Frost. University of Virginia graduate student Robert Stilling discovered the poem while during research with some Frost papers. Burnside on Non-Fiction In commenting on a letter written by Sharon Olds to Laura Bush, John Burnside writes: What makes this document powerful is, in part, its stylistic elegance, as it treads the fine line between political protest and the courtesy that any civilized human being owes to others, no matter how reprehensible their actions. Its effectiveness is enhanced…by the trust that a famously rigorous poet inspires; by the authority of one whose main pursuit is not money or fame but artistic integrity. Posted by snreview Filed in Non-Fiction, Poetry, Writing 2 Comments » « Previous Entries April 2008 M T W T F S S « Oct 123456 78910111213 14151617181920 21222324252627 282930 Pages About SNR Editor’s Blog Partial Table of Contents for Winter 2006 of SNReview SNReview Spring Issue Table of Contents SNReview’s Summer 2006 Table of Contents SNR Editor's Blog Feed PEN AwardsPamuk Wins Nobel / Finalists for National Book AwardsDesai Wins Booker, Novel in the Internet Age, Oates InsensitiveGreat British NovelsSo What about Frost / Google’s Literacy Project / Who Needs Poetry / Fitch Talks / Young PoetsRobertson Beats Heaney / Remembered Forever? / How-to Literature / Googling of Literature / Too Many Good Books / Finding Frost’s Poem / Novels and PoetsPan Redux / Politically Incorrect Correctness? / Poems by Cohen / Hornby Talks As Does Amis and Rushdie‘The Ode Less Travelled / The Bed Potato / Interview with Philip Deaver / Interview with Stephen King / Cohen AwardsPenn Writers ConferencePoets Awarded / ‘New’ Frost Poem / Burnside on Non-Fiction Blogroll Beatrice.com Book 2 Book Book Critics Circle Blog Book Ninja Book Slut Book Zone Pro Bookish Books, Inq Brit Lit Blogs Cahiers de Corey Conversational Reading Cruelest Month Elegant Variation Elephant Walk Flogging the Quill Galley Cat Interboard Poetry Community from WebDelSol.com Literary Saloon Maud Newton Metaxu Cafe Moorish Girl Poetry & Poets in Rags Publisher Insider Raincoast Books Ready Steady Book Technorati Ping The Olive Reader The Page–Poetry, Essays, and Ideas WordPress.com WordPress.org Writer’s Block Yale University Press Magazines African American Review Barcelona Review Black Warrior Review Boston Review California Literary Review Carolina Quarterly Online Chattahoochee Review Cortland Review Crazyhorse Creative Non-Fiction Fishouse Poems (From the Fishouse) Georgia Review Gettysburg Review Glimmer Train Granta Hayden’s Ferry Review Kenyon Review Mad Hatter’s Review McSweeneys Missouri Review North American Review Paris Review Ploughshares Poetry Prairie Schooner Sewanee Review Slate Small Spiral Notebook SNReview Southern Review Threepenny Review Tin House TriQuarterly Virginia Quarterly Review Publishers Contemporary Literature Writing American Academy of Poets Associated Writing Programs Council of Literary Magazines and Presses LitMag Central PEN American Center Poets & Writers Blog Stats 10,444 hits Archives October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 Theme: Simpla by Phu. 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