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The National Book Foundation is hosting a basketball game for charity in which writers will go at it in the court against publishers.

What business do literary folks have playing basketball? The idea stems from the confusion on Twitter between the National Basketball Association (#NBA) and the National Book Awards (#NBAwards). Players include: Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Jonny Diamond (Lit Hub), John Freeman (Freeman’s), Katie Freeman (Riverhead Books), Alex Gilvarry (From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant), Mitchell S. Jackson (The Residue Years), Valeria Luiselli (The Story of My Teeth), Steph Opitz (Texas Book Festival), Arthur Bradford (Turtleface and Beyond) and Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins).

The event is open to the public on Saturday, June 20 from 3 – 6 p.m. at St. Francis College gym, 180 Remsen St, Brooklyn, N.Y. Tickets start at $25. Proceeds will benefit BookUp, the National Book Foundation’s reading program for middle school students in low-income communities.

OR Books will publish an anthology focusing on income inequality within New York City called Tales of Two Cities: The Best & Worst of Times in New York. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Housing Works.

How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman served as the editor for this book and wrote one of the pieces. Some of the other contributors include Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, The Circle author Dave Eggers, and White Teeth author Zadie Smith.

Artist Molly Crabapple created five illustrations for this project. Follow this link to see photos of the book’s interior artwork. Freeman, Crabapple, and a few writers will appear at a launch party event in New York City on October 13th.

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Editor John Freeman is leaving Granta after five years at the literary journal.

He served as editor for the last four years, creating ten foreign language editions of the journal around the world. The journal will launch in Turkey and China this week, with editions in Portugal and Sweden next month. Here’s more from the release:

The total global circulation of the magazine will be 100,000 when Japanese Granta begins publishing next March. Under his editorship, the magazine also conducted more then 300 events in over 25 countries, earned more than a dozen citations in the Best of American anthologies, and won D&AD awards for cover design. Freeman divided his time between New York and London and will be moving back to New York, where he will teach creative writing at Columbia University and publish his second book, “How to Read a Novelist.”

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For the first time in ten years, Granta has revealed its list of the Best of Young British Novelists. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all 20 novelists.

The winners were chosen from among 150 novelists by a panel of judges: John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, Romesh Gunesekera, Stuart Kelly, A.L. Kennedy, Sigrid Rausing and Gaby Wood. Here’s more from the release:

At a celebration to be held at the British Council, on the evening of 15 April 2013, Granta will announce its once-in-a-decade selection of the twenty best British novelists aged under forty. Granta’s first generation-defining list of writers was published in 1983 and set the bar for the following decades.

Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall

The Liar’s Gospel by Naomi Alderman

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna

Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Waterline by Ross Raisin

Ours Are the Streets by Sunjeev Sahota

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

Kartography by Kamila Shamsie

NW by Zadie Smith

Spring by David Szalay

Politics by Adam Thirlwell

After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice by Evie Wyld

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Granta‘s theme ‘Betrayal’ offers scope for many things, from love to war, from politics to survival, and more. As usual, the pieces included come from authors around the world and their contributions are unexpected, innovative and excellent.

Janine di Giovanni, who has reported on wars for more than twenty years, begins ‘Seven Days in Syria’ with her baby son, whose tiny nails she finds herself unable to cut. She charts this same sense of vulnerability in the lives of the Syrian people as she sees the effects of war gradually seep into their lives. Her account is personal and vivid. “There is no template for war“, she writes,  only the agony, the uncertainty and the fear, which is constant.

Karen Russell, too, writes of the effects of war but she weaves a sort of magic into her fictional story. Beverly, a professional masseuse, begins therapeutic massage on an Iraqi war veteran whose body tattoo is a “skin mural” of the war-landscape on the day his friend was killed. “Healing is a magical art” said a pamphlet which attracted Beverly to her career, and her ability to empathise with a customer and to use her massage skills to feel and relax the tensions expressed in the physical body is remarkable. But her expert physical work with this particular customer has inexplicable results, the tattoo does strange things, and there are unexpected psychological effects for both of them.

As well as reportage and stories, Granta includes photography and poetry. Darcy Padilla’s photographs of ‘Julie’ chart a life affected by poverty, abuse and AIDS but they show happiness, partnerships and children as part of her struggle to survive. And John Burnside’s poem, ‘Postscript’, echoes some of Robert Frost’s well-known lines and offers a modern perspective on an evening in snowy woods. It tells of a passing moment in which a search for a mobile phone signal prompts musings on the ephemeral nature of beauty, a cup of tea, a welcoming home and “no promises to keep“. And the only path is the one back to the car.

Mohsin Hamid tells of a young boy’s text-message based love affair with a local girl who has the ambition, it is suggested, of sleeping her way to a better life. Samantha Harvey’s small-scale apocalypse-survival scenario set on a fictional island could well be a true story. André Aciman documents an editor’s experience with a young woman writer with whom he begins a strangely satisfying relationship. Neither of them seem fully able to commit themselves but perhaps it is just his reading of the situation, or perhaps he is just a man who cannot make big decisions. The result? I will not spoil the story by revealing it.

Colin Robinson learns about group loyalty and Paddleball. Ben Marcus imagines a dystopia in which group and family loyalties are tested. Lauren Wilkinson writes of the fatal attraction of guns. And Jennifer Vanderbes writes of a lone woman fire-mapper in the forests of New Mexico whose isolated life is briefly disrupted by a male forestry worker  with whom she shares friendship and memories. Both, it turns out, have reasons for choosing to work with fire.

Callan Wink’s ‘One More Last Stand’, introduces us to a man who participates in historical re-enactments of General Custer’s last stand but who is inclined to tell tall tales to tourists and to fraternize with the ‘enemy’. It can also be read on the Granta web site at http://www.granta.com/ , along with other material not included in this quarter’s magazine.

Granta 122: Betrayal  is excellent reading and a fine addition to Granta’s long tradition of fostering new writing.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2013
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/
Sylvia Plath, Ariel and the Tarot: http://ann.skea.com/Arielindex.html

The Asian American Writers Workshop is celebrating its 20th anniversary by hosting the third annual Page Turner literary festival. The all-day event will take place on Saturday, October 29th at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena. Follow this link to view the full schedule.

Here’s more from the release: “Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.”

The festival will feature appearances by Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney. Attendees will also get a chance to hear from two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists and seven Guggenheim Fellows.

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