Source: msharkness.com
Peter Ferguson is my favorite artist working today. He asks the questions we all want the answers to - What if H P Lovecraft wrote the Bobbsey Twins? What if John Dos Pasos's U.S. A. Trilogy was about the Island of Misfit Toys ? What if James M. Cain wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
Source: peterfergusonart.com
Celebrating Literature That ‘Brings the World Close’
Words Without Borders, a magazine dedicated to literature in translation, is turning 20 at a fraught time. How to celebrate words when bombs are dropping?
by Robert Ito
Words Without Borders, one of the few magazines in the world dedicated to literature in translation, is turning 20 at a fraught time: Around the world, wars are raging. Writers are being jailed, dissident voices silenced and books banned.
As the magazine’s staff considered its anniversary celebrations — a virtual gala on Nov. 2, following a live one on Oct. 25 — one question was pressing: How do you find words, let alone celebrate them, when bombs are dropping?
The answer, said Karen M. Phillips, the magazine’s executive editor and publisher, was right there, baked into their mission — to gather and celebrate international literature, and in doing so, strengthen the connection between readers and writers around the world. Given the current political climate, the need for such conversations has never been more vital.
Source: The New York Times
Will US comic readers take to this new format?
An interesting strategy though I don't think price is the source of all their problems and I wonder how long before 9.99 becomes 12.99 then 14.99. Still, the trim may be close enough to B Format in the UK to break into book trade there. From the US consumer perspective, it still feels like shrinkflation. When Pepperidge Farm shrank their cookies I stopped buying them. They just didn't feel like a treat anymore. It's like DC has decided the answer to lagging sales is to create a graphic novel equivalent of a mass-market paperback when the mass-market novel as a format is sinking like a rock - down 17.8% over the last year. There will be strong initial sell-in to the mass market and book trade but I guess the big question is are these editions going to be stripped cover returns? ~ eP
Louise Glück: The poet who taught me to write books
by Meghan O’Rourke
THE FIRST BOOK of poetry I ever read was Ararat (1990), by Louise Glück. I had read many poems in classes, from anthologies, but had never actually read a collection of poems front to back, or even thought about a collection as a meaningful record of a poet’s creative output at a given time. At the time—this was 1994—I was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Yale, enrolled in my first poetry workshop. Our professor, the poet Wayne Koestenbaum, had given us the task of reading a book of contemporary poetry and writing a brief report. On a dull spring day, I sat on the floor at the Yale Co-op leafing through books, until I found Ararat, and opened it randomly to the poem “Celestial Music”:
I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god, she thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth, she’s unusually competent. Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it. I’m always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality. But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes. Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out according to nature. For my sake, she intervened, brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.
The opening of the poem (it goes on for another page) riveted me: the way it parsed its own thinking, each new line bringing a refinement of what had come before, moving casually yet devastatingly to the insight “For my sake, she intervened,” in which the relationship between the speaker and the friend flips, with the friend, suddenly, seeming to have a kind of knowledge the speaker can’t muster in the face of suffering.
Source: yalereview.org
Seamus Heaney and the art of translation.
The Example of Seamus Heaney
by David Mason
Air from another life and time and place . . . —Seamus Heaney, “A Kite for Aibhín”
I am grateful for the example of Seamus Heaney, both man and poet, fully engaged in his time and his art with its visions of timelessness. He was never distracted by trends and trivialities. If the world seemed, implausibly, a better place when he lived, at least we now have his living work, its humane erudition, vitality and growth. Heaney said that Robert Frost inhabited the world at body heat. He could have been talking of himself. The biographer R. F. Foster refers to Heaney’s “overpowering but benign authority,” and anyone who knew him remembers an affable presence. His was an earthly civility. A farmer’s son, he led the life of a privileged intellectual and writer, “always politic / And shy of condescension” (as he put it in a great poem, “Casualty”). He worked hard, and the result of the labor was not just his productivity, but also his ability to change.
The voice with its guttural muse was there from the start, but he rarely stalled in his development and rarely fell into self-parody. His few lapses do not matter. What matters is the way he took on the world, becoming for good reasons a poet with a planetary following. He grew by diligent absorption, harnessing (as he might have put it) multiple languages and traditions—not only Irish and Anglo-Saxon, not only Yeats, Wordsworth and Frost, not only Dante, whom he called his favorite poet, but also a varied bench of modern Italian, French, Polish, Romanian and Russian poets. He was something of a classicist, who made fascinating versions of Sophocles, Ovid and Virgil. Now that we have his translations brought together in one volume, we can see that this activity was not a casual occupier of time between his own books, but a driver of germination, a way of thriving.[1] He was not a purist about anything—some of his translations are so free they become nearly original poems, just as his original poems converse with his translations—yet his freedom was accompanied by rigor. I might not love everything in this new book equally, but that does not prevent me from thinking it an essential contribution to any understanding of Heaney’s work. And more than that: a way of bringing worlds to bear.
Source: hudsonreview.com
Making of a Poem: Olivia Sokolowski on “Lover of Cars”
by Olivia Sokolowski
For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.
How did writing the first draft feel to you?
I’ve been into cars since I was around fifteen and daydreaming of nineties Jaguars, but somehow, I’d never written much about them. Along the I-75 last winter, noticing and cataloguing the steady stream of cars along the meridian, I decided it was time to convert my obsession into a poetic one. Prompts are normally tough for me—I feel put on the spot and all my good images flee. But when I set out to write about cars, the task-poem turned out far better than I imagined. Perhaps because the topic is so rich—cars not only engage all of our senses but are also thoroughly ingrained in our cultural and personal histories. I surprised myself with the veer toward a family/coming-of-age narrative. The more luxurious bits, like dreaming of an otherworldly Audi or joyriding through Cinque Terre, were just plain fun to write. I lived vicariously through my speaker.
Who is this speaker? Do you imagine her as a character, or as kind of a pure voice? How similar is she to you, or to your voice?
I call my speaker Olivia+. She draws from my life without the responsibility of fidelity, and she acts and speaks in ways that I might not. She keeps an audience in mind but doesn’t expect a reply. She’s my freer alter ego.
Source: theparisreview.org
Asher Perlman
I have books on my Ofrenda because they were part of so many of my friends and loved ones lives. I thought it might be nice to start a little Day of the Dead bookclub for the departed.
From the bottom up:
- A book on the American Fantasy Tradition edited by a good friend who I miss dearly.
- A novel by J. P. Donleavy in honor of my mother-in-law who badgered me into reading The Gingerman and I am eternally grateful for it.
- Two books of Latin American literature that sparked my father to travel to Mexico City to write his college thesis on the Mexican New Wave of writers and also where he met and fell in love with my mother.
- And lastly, on top of the pile, a copy of a science fiction paperback my brother and I stole from our dear Tia Chela when we were in Mexico as kids. (It was also her copy of the Painted Bird that I read for the first time - at the age of 12. So many feelings.)
I think they would enjoy reading each other's books.
I also left a nice local amaro to help lubricate discussion as they walk back through the veil.
New York is a city of unique and niche neighborhoods so it stands to reason it can support such a virbrant and fascinating collection of themed bookstores. This is a nice tour of some of Gotham's best.
(Yes, its in that slideshow format. I hate those too but this one is not as offensive to wade through. Its worth a tour. ~ eP)
The author's dilemma
Like founders of startups, authors have difficult decisions to make when it comes to scaling their business.
by Mark Piesing
Writers are entrepreneurs, and writers are also founders of a one-person startup. Like any founder, I needed to make sure my startup had clear targets. I didn’t think Mark Zuckerberg’s "move fast and break things" worked for a writer, but there was plenty of other advice handed out by founders – such as understand the market, identify your USP, set short-term and long-term targets, and even know what success looks like – which did help me structure my days. For, yes, I was a founder of a startup, but one in which I must play all the roles myself, from product development to social media, marketing, business development and finance – I am sure I have missed some out – while somehow keeping to the nine-to-five days I was advised to follow to avoid burnout.
(If you can't read The Bookseller article its easy to register for 2 free articles a month. Its worth the effort.)
One thing I always tell new authors is that the moment you finish your manuscript and put down your pen you cease being an author. You are now a publishing company. This is a sobering article if you are planning to self publish.
Even if you are lucky enough to have a publisher you still have to think about marketing and publicity. What is my publisher's marketing budget for this book? Do I have an assigned publicist? Should I get my own publicist? What is the cover going to look like? Who is giving the cover artist the art order? Where can I get this reviewed in advance of printing and which are my publisher not sending to? Do I send my own author copies? Who are all the local bookstores in my state and what is the real instore date so I can book signings with confidence that books will be there? What is my publisher's minimum opening order for my local indie bookstore to order my book? Does Ingram stock my book in the Ingram warehouse that my local store gets free freight from? Are there international fan clubs for the genre my book is in? How do I contact them to get an interview? Is my book even being sold internationally? Will my daughter help me understand tiktok? Should I take dance lessons?
You are only an author for a brief amount of time. Then you have to go to work.
~eP
Source: thebookseller.com
ebookporn reblogged
Cover reveal! I'm excited to share my new book, POETRY COMICS, coming this spring from Chronicle Books. It combines poetry and comics in a brand new way with over 90 pages of never-before-seen comics.
Pre-order it here, available internationally wherever you get your books: https://smarturl.it/PoetryComics
Hope you enjoy it!
Loved Grant's work since I worked at Andrews McMeel. His comics are beautiful, thoughtful, and most importantly - hopeful. Looking forward to this collection.
It’s no laughing matter. Austerity, consolidation and platform disparity undermine cartoons and comics
by Rob Tornoe
Ginger Meggs is an institution in Australia, where the beloved comic strip — about a “red-haired larrikin” living in the suburbs — has run in newspapers nationwide for over 100 years.
But that relationship between generations of Australians and the newspapers that have long published the comic strip was instantly severed when the two major chains down under — Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment — decided to eliminate all comic strips.
News Corp. was first to the party, ending the funny pages in over 100 Australian newspapers in September 2022 to focus on games and puzzles, citing “changing readership habits of our audiences.” Nine Entertainment, whose chain of 100 newspapers includes the country’s most-read broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, did the same thing in August.
It wasn’t just “Ginger Meggs” that was impacted. Other long-running Australian comic strips —“Swamp” by Gary Clark, “Snake” by Sols (real name Allan Salisbury), “Insanity Streak” by Tony Lopes, and “Beyond the Black Stump ” by Sean Leahy — all came suddenly face-to-face with a future where not a single newspaper in the entire country published comics.
Source: editorandpublisher.com
How common is plagiarism in the publishing industry?
The shadow chancellor’s new book has come under scrutiny for lifting passages of text from other sources without acknowledgment. Academic writers explore how this can happen
by Caroline Davies
Rachel Reeves’s mea culpa over her failure to properly reference some sentences in her new book has thrown the spotlight on the thorny issue of plagiarism and the pitfalls of tedious factchecking.
Publishers and authors agree that if your name is on the book cover, the responsibility to properly reference any borrowed phrases or facts in the bibliography lies squarely with you.
“One thing that is quite curious,” one publishing insider said of the industry, “is that there doesn’t seem to be much formal factchecking. The author warrants to deliver something that is original, not plagiarised. It’s in the contract.” The publisher, they added, “is taking it on trust”
Source: theguardian.com
ebookporn reblogged
Jack Anderson long-time dance critic for the New York Times and esteemed Hanging Loose poet died yesterday at age 88. Jack was a formally inventive and wildly imaginative poet, wth a dead-pan sense of humor. His many New York subway pooems are legendary. Jack appeared in the very first issue of Hanging Loose magazine in 1966 and, as we prepare issue #114 to go press, I realize he has a new poem in this issue, too: a span of 57 years! Jack published four terrific collections of poetry with Hanging Loose, all of which are still in print. We editors mourn his loss.
Mark Pawlak, Co-editor and Publisher at Hanging Loose Press
Source: hangingloosepress.com