So you wanna be an author? Here are 5 painful and incredibly difficult steps to becoming an author, from Craked‘s Robert Brockway.
5 steps to authordom!
2010 National Book Award Winners Announced
The 2010 National Book Awards were announced this evening. In fiction, Jaimy Gordon won for The Lord of Misrule; in nonfiction, Patti Smith won for Just Kids; in poetry, Terrance Hayes won for Lighthead; and for young people’s literature, Kathryn Erskine won for Mockingbird.
#Read4Refugees
Go Jane Give organized the “#Read4Refugees” social media campaign, encouraging users to raise awareness and funds for refugee issues. Over the past month, numerous well-known authors have joined in, including Junot Díaz, Jodi Picoult, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sherman Alexie, among others.
RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing passed away last night at the age of 94. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child and The Golden Notebook took home the Nobel in 2007 for “subjecting a divided civilisation to scrutiny,” in the words of the prize committee.
More Baffler
We recently noted the return of The Baffler. Robert Birnbaum recently interviewed the magazine’s new publisher John H. Summers.
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Meghan O’Rourke on Anne Carson’s Nox
At The New Yorker, Meghan O’Rourke lyrically reviews Anne Carson’s latest work Nox: “Grief is paradoxical … The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace is mainly in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace and also, This has been going on a long time.”
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