The Story Prize has announced its nominees for the 2011 prize, We Others by Steven Millhauser, Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman, The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo. Our review of the latter was published today.
The Story Prize 2011 Shortlist
Sedaris’s Story Comes to the Big Screen
After years of rebuffing film deals and movie rights offers, David Sedaris has finally allowed one of his stories to be made into a motion picture. This month, you’ll be able to check out University of Miami alum Kyle Alvarez’s adaptation of “C.O.G.” (Child of God). You can check out a trailer over here.
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America’s Next Top Laureate
California’s San Mateo County is “seeking nominations for poet laureate, someone who can act as an ambassador for literary arts.” Do you have what it takes?
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Bullish on Bookstagram
"It’s hard to say what truly moves the needle. Bookstagrammers help in that they get images of your book cover out there (and they make them look so pretty!), and readers need to see a book a couple of times, in a couple of different places, before they are inclined to buy it." Author Brenda Janowitz in Forbes about the surprising success of Instagram as a book marketing platform. See also Davey Davis from our own pages on the Insta-pornification of food.
Criminal Justice in America: A Failure
William Stuntz's book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice investigates "how, over the past 50 years, our criminal justice system had been transformed into an unfair, amoral bureaucracy--one that had given up on the very idea of justice." Its genesis is worth reading about. So, too, is this related article in the most recent edition of n+1, "Raise the Crime Rate."
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For Whom The Bell Tolls
No, not "whom"! - The death of a word.
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Vitality/Banality
To prepare us for the release of Italo Calvino’s letters, the editors at Page-Turner are running excerpts from the book. In their latest installment -- following their first two -- Calvino describes New York City, which “swallowed [him] up like a carnivorous plant.”