Elaine Kaufman supported writers at her restaurant when she was alive, and the Table 4 Writers Foundation keeps her legacy going with its grant. The third annual writers’ grants contest will award a $5,000 grand prize and two $2,500 prizes for promising writers. Applications are due by November 15 and can be submitted here. For more on Kaufman, read our own Bill Morris’s tribute.
Table 4 Grant
“Inspiration and Obsession”
Recommended reading: Joyce Carol Oates writes about "Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature" for the New York Review of Books.
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The Naked Truth About Favorite Poems
Reddit users asked one another to name their all-time favorite poems. Not to be outdone, Poetry Brain asked its Twitter followers to name their all-time favorite poems… to read naked. Since I imagine the latter group is usually only able to read in the buff while at home, I bet they really lament the 2001 demise of Harvard’s “Phone-a-Poem” feature.
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All Your Favorite Books
This week in book-related infographics that are also, as an added bonus, interactive: "A Google Map of All Your Favorite Books," via Electric Literature.
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Who She’s Writing For
Dispatch From the Future and The Fallback Plan author Leigh Stein explains that she is writing her forthcoming memoir, Land of Enchantment, for “everyone who’s been to more funerals than weddings, everyone who lurks on the Internet late at night looking at pictures of their lost loves, everyone who cries when a certain song comes on the radio because they think it must be a sign.”
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Reading from the Man Booker Shortlist
We recently announced the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. At Granta, you can read an excerpt from Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, included on the list.
Near to the wild heart
A charming doodle of the beautiful connecting covers for mid Clarice Lispector's four soon-to-be-released novels. You can also buy a poster of the original from New Directions. And given how much Carolyn Kellogg enjoyed them, mentally shelving the Brazilian author beside Kafka and Joyce, and of course based on the near infinite readability of The Hour of the Star, I'm wondering if this will be the year of Lispector.
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Papismo
Legend has it that Hemingway, after reading a review of his work that he didn’t like, strode into the reviewer’s office and slapped him across the face with a book. Upset over a line that questioned his bravado -- the line compared his writing style to “wearing false hair on the chest” -- Hemingway tore off his shirt to prove his chest hair was real. This week, The New Republic republished the article that started the fight. (For a lighter take on the author, you could read Stephanie Bernhard on cooking recipes in Hemingway's fiction.)
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