November 15, 2012 Bulletin Louise Erdrich Wins NBA for Fiction By Sadie Stein We’d like to congratulate Louise Erdrich on her National Book Award for The Round House. The following quote, from her Art of Fiction interview, explores the author’s approach to writing: I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence … But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, It can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.
November 15, 2012 First Person Where It All Went Wrong By Will Boast In February, I got an email out of the blue from the director of the Cork International Short Story Festival—the same festival associated with the annual Frank O’Connor Award, worth 25,000 Euros. My first thought: Oh, shit, break out the champagne! Back on planet earth, I wasn’t even short-listed. But I was being invited to read at the festival, and they would pay my travel expenses, put me up in a nice hotel, and—how could you say no?—provide free gourmet sandwiches for the duration of my time in Cork. Bless the good people programming the festival; in a year when a lot of excellent writers had published story collections, I wasn’t entirely sure why they wanted me to come. Possibly because, in my bio note, I always begin by saying, “Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin.” I was, in some sense, a local boy. From 1982 to 1986, my family lived in Newcastle West, a small village in County Limerick about an hour and a half drive from Cork. After twenty-five years away, I finally had an excuse to go back. Coming into Cork, I got my first twinge of homecoming. I didn’t know this city (any childhood memories of visiting Cork are utterly gone), and yet the rolling landscape, the narrow streets, and even the color of the houses seemed already mapped out in my mind. Then I got in a cab and started speaking to the driver. I thought at first he was German, so thick and strange was his accent. Read More
November 15, 2012 Arts & Culture Introducing the Biblio-Mat! By Sadie Stein The Monkey’s Paw dubs itself “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic secondhand bookshop,” a mix of antiquarian treasures, oddities, art installations, and eccentricities of all kinds. Their latest innovation? The Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random used books. As owner Stephen Fowler told Quill & Quire, “The books in the machine are two dollars each—that’s not enough to make any profit, but the nature of the secondhand book business is that I end up with a lot of books that are interesting and worth keeping and disseminating, but have no practical retail value.” For more on why we love this place, check out this 2010 short film:
November 15, 2012 First Person Daydream Believer By Pamela Petro The daydreaming thing was my brother’s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn’t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour family trips from New Jersey to drop him off or pick him up, my parents took me to Luray Caverns. I must’ve been about eleven years old. God almighty! Who knew they kept all that stuff underground? I was agog! Great dripstone formations that looked like melting candles. Stalactites and mites the shades of fall vegetables and seashells. If Luray wasn’t exactly the hidden world I’d been looking for, it was something close: it was the key that freed my imagination from my own experience. (About three or four years earlier I’d sat straight up in bed one night, shaking from the sudden, unwished-for understanding that one day I would die and there would be no more me on earth. I understood this not only as a personal catastrophe but a tragedy for the world as well. What would it do without me? That moment, I think, paved the way for my imagination to gallop ahead of my life in the here and now. It prepared me for Luray.) Read More
November 15, 2012 On the Shelf When Poets Cook, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Few poets, it would seem, are willing to claim as favorite any old run of the mill standard recipe.” When poets cook. Dream homes built for books and the nerds who love them. The Institute of Egypt in Cairo, which suffered damage and losses last December, has been given four thousand rare books. “The reason we decided to do handmade books, sewing them instead of having them stapled, is because we wanted to make durable books that would be precious. When you get a Crumpled Press book, you can feel that it was handmade by somebody, you can feel slight irregularities in it. It’s a precious object that you’re not going to throw away. So if I make 250 or 1,000 copies, those books are going to carry on.”
November 14, 2012 Bulletin Act Fast: Offer Will Not Last! By Sadie Stein This Friday, November 16, is your last chance to take advantage of our special mug deal! If you’ll recall, one side of this classic diner mug displays our logo. The other side (not pictured here): “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time.” —Newsweek, 1953 It’s yours with a one-year subscription or renewal; your subscription will begin with our winter issue. Order now! Offer good for U.S. addresses only.