A Taste of Saudade
Holiday OuLiPo
This holiday season, show a little restraint. Write a short short that uses each word only once, and email it to [email protected] by December 31 at midnight for your chance to win Electric Literature vol. 1 and be published on their blog, The Outlet. Further details available here.
Reading Proust
For the Atlantic, Sarah Boxer recounts her experience reading In Search of Lost Time on her cell phone. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s year of reading Proust.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire Poet?
There’s an oxymoron for you: “Rich Poet.” But the new fortunes of Emirati poet Saif Al Mansouri prove that with talent, grit, and a live television audience, truly anything is possible. The UAE show “Millionaire’s Poet,” in its sixth season, awarded $1.3 million (the Nobel Prize. for comparison, is $1.2 million) to winner Al Mansouri, and perhaps something even more valuable – a global audience of up to 70 million, actually tuning in.
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New Releases: Foer, Coupland, King
Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is out today. It’s 1,100 pages and is being compared to The Stand. Meanwhile, Generation A by Douglas Coupland is also hitting shelves. It’s a sequel to Coupland’s famous, influential debut, Generation X. Also out last week was Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatise on vegetarianism, Eating Animals, which picked up a mixed review in the New Yorker.
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DIAGRAM’s 2012 Essay Contest
The deadline for DIAGRAM’s annual essay contest is fast approaching. Past winners include Peter Jay Shippy’s “Goonies: or Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snowman’–an Essay in 7 Films” and (my all-time favorite) Cheyenne Nimes’s “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.”
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.literature
Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
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Aura Estrada Short Story Contest
Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Contest is underway. This year’s submissions will be judged by What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank author (as well as Year in Reading contributor) Nathan Englander, and the victor will earn a $1,500 prize as well as publication.
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