Open City, which is published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, is awarding $5,000 grants to “talented Asian American emerging writers looking to hone their creative nonfiction skills by engaging directly with contemporary New York.” The application deadline is April 8.
Open City Grants
Talking with Colum McCann
“I’ve been writing about ‘real’ characters and placing them in a shaped, or fictional, world. Writing TransAtlantic, there was never really a plan, at the early stages, to question the line between fiction and nonfiction. I just went on instinct, and then these worlds started to braid.” The Rumpus interviews Colum McCann.
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The Books Coming from Ukraine
Citing the cliché that people “only become interested in a country’s literature once we start bombing in” as his reason, Chad Post takes a close look at some recently published Ukrainian books.
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One-Night Reads
“Ever since, I have added a new layer of rules for my casual sex partners, especially when I end up in their space: I ask them for a book prior to exiting. I might phrase it more diplomatically, saying ‘I just want to read something on my train-ride back,’ or ‘I just finished my last book and I have been looking for the next one.’ Via this simple action I can estimate a lot more on a broad scale of very personal information and variation of taste than what I could possibly collect through hours of post-coital, emotional interrogation.” Seven books Elias Tezapsidis acquired through casual sex.
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Going In
In 2012, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, on the occasion of Kim Il-Sung’s 100th birthday, went to North Korea for a fifteen-day trip. The experience led him to write a travel memoir, Inside the Secret, which you can read in serialized form online at Ninth Letter magazine. You could also read Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson’s new Granta essay about the country.
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Needs a Good Family
Seventy-two copies of One Story are looking for loving homes. Reader, will you be a dear and adopt a hungry short story?
Catalog Upon Catalog
LibraryThing has published the catalog of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal library. You can check out a list of all 322 titles here (PDF). Meanwhile, from the department of “new books you can actually buy,” New Directions has published their Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 catalog (PDF) as well.
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I Am Jack’s Graphic Novel Sequel
Chuck Palahniuk dropped big news at San Diego’s Comic Con last week: he’s currently working on a follow-up to Fight Club… in the form of a graphic novel. “It will likely be a series of books that update the story ten years after the seeming end of Tyler Durden,” he told attendees. “It will, of course, be dark and messy.”
In Context
At Signature Reads, Matt Staggs offers some reading suggestions in light of the discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws recently passed in Mississippi, North Carolina, and other states.