Former Pulitzer Prize juror Laura Miller gives a little insight into how the award works, and posits some possible reasons that the fiction award may have been withheld.
No award given
The Best Web Publications Are Also The Youngest
Between the 40 Towns project organized by Jeff Sharlet’s Dartmouth students and the newly unveiled Vanishing Point project from Duncan Murrell’s students at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, it seems abundantly clear that college students are better at putting together web publications than 99% of established publishing outfits. Begin your tour with Christine Delp’s look at a blind man who makes his own martinis, and then check out other stories such as Ge Jin’s photographic essay on Chinese university students.
5 steps to authordom!
So you wanna be an author? Here are 5 painful and incredibly difficult steps to becoming an author, from Craked‘s Robert Brockway.
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Mining and Mapping Life with Patricia Engel
Patricia Engel discusses her latest novel, Infinite Country, and how storytelling was instilled within her from an early age.
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Keep It in Your Pants and out of the Plot
Terrible sex writing spans the globe according to this year’s Bad Sex Award shortlist. It includes: My Education by Susan Choi, The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, House of Earth by Woody Guthrie, Motherland by William Nicholson, The Victoria System by Eric Reinhardt, The World Was All Before Them by Matthew Reynolds, The City of Devi by Manil Suri, and Secrecy by Rupert Thomson. The winner will be announced on December 3.
Wiesel in Disney
Something to brighten your day — Elie Wiesel visited Disneyland and absolutely loved it.
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Byron-ness
Which Lord Byron is the most Byron-y? Let Mallory Ortberg tell you in her rankings of Byron portraits.
In/sane
If you’re not already a fan of Will Self, his new book, Shark, may not be the best place to start. As Walker Rutter-Bowman points out, the book dispatches with many of the conventions of modern writing, including line breaks, paragraphs and dialogue tags. But it’s still an effort worthy of its author, he writes: “Here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely renders mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.”
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“Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home”
“Then, about an hour into the newest version, it struck me: it’s Twilight!…That’s how I would have pitched the film, and the fact that I was thinking of it while watching Heathcliff and Catherine break each other’s hearts was an indication of Arnold’s failure to capture a fraction of Brontë’s genius.” The impossibility of filming Wuthering Heights.
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