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Do you plan on celebrating Valentine’s Day this weekend?
The New York Public Library team created a map of fictional romances set in New York City. According to the organization’s blog post, a group of book experts shared some of “their favorite romantic scenes that take place in the city.”
This interactive map features several well-known spots such as The Museum of Natural History, The Strand bookstore, and the 7 train. Some of the books that provided these locations include The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith. Follow this link to view the map.
In my memoir class at the University of Pennsylvania, we're focusing on failure/mistake memoirs, and what they teach us. To get my own self into a teaching place, I spent considerable time during Christmas and the first weeks of the new year, studying the books that I am teaching—and thinking.
The
Chicago Tribune kindly gave me room to put that thinking on its pages.
I'm thrilled to also be able to share that Daniel Menaker, the author of
My Mistake and an esteemed editor in his own right, will be visiting Kelly Writers House for a publishers lunch and then my class on February 24th, at Penn.
The
Tribune essay can be found
here.
Yesterday I found myself with a little time. Oh, I thought at once. You must go and dig out that novel and use this time well.
Use this time. The unfortunate Beth Kephart mantra.
Here's what ensued instead. I sat on a round chair with a heating pad on my throbbing shoulder, my toes sticking out of a short blanket. I piled upon my lap the printed and discarded pages of previous novelistic efforts (those pages then flipped, eco-sensitively, to the blank side). I wielded a pen. I sat.
Hours went by.
"So glad to see you working on your novel," my husband said.
I showed him the pages, all those blank sides. "No work here," I said.
"It's all work," he rebutted.
To me, I looked like a sloth. To the pen, a failure. To the patiently a-waiting novel, a lost friend, a lost cause.
But here's the thing: In the midst of all that apparent nothingness, I figured something out. Something about voice. A big thing about plot.
Does that count for a work day? Should I be proud? Would other writer-selves be proud?
This is not a competition.
Still, it sometimes helps to read about the work process of established writers like, say, Gary Shteyngart, who has never had, he says, an issue with writer's block. One novel by one novel (and one fine memoir) his books progressively come. It may seem to us like he is working very fast. But here is how he answers the progress/process question for Noah Charney of
The Daily Beast. I like his math (if only I could rise to it).
The entire interview can be found
here.
What do you need to have produced/completed in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?Two to three pages in first draft, five pages in second, seven in third.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 1/2/2015
Blog:
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During the last third of this upcoming semester at Penn my students will be reading
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeff Hobbs. It will be, for us, the fourth book in a "failure" series designed to provoke conversation and insight into the accidental, the premeditated, the inescapable, the unnecessary, the broken and the fixed—the things that shape all our lives. (The first three books are
Little Failure, My Mistake, and
Fire Shut Up in My Bones.)I am keen to talk failure at a time when the world exasperates and disappoints, when the incomprehensible exists beside simple acts of compassion. I am keen to talk about socioeconomics and race, about the immigrant experience, about the irreversibly tragic, about the elusive promises of narrative and books. I am keen to teach the forms of memoir and narrative nonfiction, yes. But the quality of conversation will be of equal significance. Those of us who teach memoir have, I think, a responsibility to broaden the scope and enlarge the talk.
Peace is not a memoir. It is the deeply reported story, as the subtitle tells us, of a brilliant young man who leaves Newark for the Ivy League only to return to one of the nation's most dangerous cities—and stay, teaching some times, dealing drugs, too; a role model and a criminal. Robert Peace became Jeff Hobbs' roommate during freshman year at Yale. He was at his best and seemingly most true when helping others—his single mother living in poverty, his incarcerated father, his family and his friends. He was at his most self-protected and (also) vulnerable when he trafficked in drugs, when he revealed the depths of his anger, when he could find no answer, increasingly, to the question:
What are you, Yalie, doing with the rest of your life?Hobbs did not take the easy way out in telling this story. He might have written memoir only, recreating his impressions of the guy with whom he lived for four Yale years, talking, exclusively, about how it all seemed to him. Instead Hobbs goes all the way back to the beginning, relying on hundreds of hours of interviews to find out who Rob was, to learn the complexities that riddled his heart.
I have written in the margins of almost every page of this book. I have thought about what I hope my students will find as they read. This book should be required reading for everyone. But for now, to entice you, here is Rob, as he was introduced at his high school graduation, in the pages of Hobbs' book:
The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and who was now among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn't knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale
And then here is Rob, now that his days at Yale are over. He has graduated brilliantly (despite a thriving pot business on campus). But he has returned to Newark with no real plans, only a desire to take care of those he loves, and the willingness (or the arrogance) to court danger:
Rob's role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy's, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood's underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.
I am at work on a long essay and preparing for the memoir class I'll teach this spring at the University of Pennsylvania
This is hardly drudgery.
I am, for example, entertaining myself by reading Gary Shteyngart's brilliant bittersweetness,
Little Failure. It is quite an effort, between crying at all the funnies and crying at all the sads, but I have persevered.
Today, last day in a year that has been hard for so many of us, on so many of us, I pluck a passage from
Little Failure to share. The deliberately understated absurdity of it made me holler with laughter. I hope it makes you laugh, too. Sometimes laughter is the best gift we can give another.
Here are Gary and his father, relative newcomers to Queens. They have an adventure:
There's a movie theater on Main Street, and my father is excited because they are showing a French movie, and so it must be very cultured. The movie is called Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman, and it will be interesting to see how joyful these Frenchwomen actually are, most likely because of their exquisite cultural patrimony. ("Balzac, Renoir, Pissarro, Voltaire," my father sings to me on the way over to the theater.) The next eighty-three minutes are spent with Papa's hairy hand clasped to my eyes, the Herculean task before me: getting it unclasped. The less explicit parts of Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman are set in a Hong Kong brothel or a Macao girls' boarding school, and then it's all downhill from there.
What books did you enjoy reading this year? The BookBub team has created a new infographic with “the ultimate list” of “The Best Books of 2014” which features many popular titles including Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, and Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart.
According to the BookBub blog, the data used for this project from “23 different Best of 2014 lists — from The Washington Post to Library Journal to Buzzfeed and more.” We’ve embedded the entire graphic below for you to explore further.
(more…)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Whenever I want to learn something really important about life, I hang out with my son, a philosophizing dude if ever there was one.
During a recent search for a new career, this handsome philosopher never once allowed disappointment or consecutive near misses or the perplexities of corporate America to daunt him.
You're winning because you never lose hope, I would tell him.
I'm doing what I have to do, he'd say.
One day, texting the words above, he also wrote this:
"I've come up with this motto," he said. "And I plan to live by it."
This year at Penn (a coincidence) I'm teaching failure memoirs. As I prepare for the class, reading, say, Charles Blow and Daniel Menaker and Gary Shteyngart, I'm looking back at my son's live-by-them words and thinking about how implicit that lesson is in each story I read—and how it applies to us all.
We had our son's motto carved into cherry wood and framed for Christmas (my husband's design). It's not a new car, a new suit, a new electronic device, even. But it seemed the biggest gift we could give. Our son's intelligence reflected back at him.
Writer Lev Grossman turned to crowdsourcing to create the book trailer for the third and final installment of the Magicians trilogy.
The video embedded above features American Gods writer Neil Gaiman, Wicked author Gregory Maguire, Fangirl novelist Rainbow Rowell, and many others reading the first chapter of the The Magician’s Land.
Which one of these authors would you choose as the narrator for the audiobook? (via BuzzFeed)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Novelist Gary Shteyngart was one of the people tapped for a trial of Google Glass, giving the satirist a chance to explore a technology straight out of one of his novels. He told BuzzFeed this was not a joke: “we’re working on trying to adapt [Super Sad True Love Story] as a television series, so it would be helpful for me to see just how close this thing is.”
Shteyngart also appeared on KCRW’s To the Point show this week, talking about his new pair of fancy glasses. Despite his new technological push, he reassured readers that this wasn’t the end of his writing career:
I gave up on writing novels with all this technology. So now I finished a memoir. Even as I’m looking into the future with Google Glass, I’m trying to look into the past with the rest of me.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By: Jason Boog,
on 10/9/2012
Blog:
Galley Cat (Mediabistro)
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On November 7, a special reading at WORD in Brooklyn will celebrate the blurbs that novelist Gary Shteyngart has bestowed upon other books.
Jacob Silverman created a Tumblr site dedicated to archiving The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart, collecting the author’s praise for books by authors ranging from Molly Ringwald to Adam Wilson to Lev Grossman. You can also follow Shteyngart on Twitter.
Check it out: ”The Shteyngart blurb has become almost a seal of approval that, while comical in the sheer amount of books he’s actually blurbed, are actually really good ways to tell if you’re going to like a book or not … The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart, Live brings together John Wray, Rachel Shukert, Adam Wilson, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Karolina Waclawiak (as well as a few words from Silverman), all authors blurbed by Mr. Shteyngart, for a night of readings and tribute to the Russian-born oligarch of back cover quotes..” (Photo via Mark Coggins; link via Sarah Weinman)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
In his talk Salman Rushdie lamented both a certain human tendency to value material well-being over intellectual freedom, a tension other panels at the festival attempted to confront as well.
Today the organizers of the Scotiabank Giller Prize revealed the three-person jury for the 2012 prize: novelist Roddy Doyle and Gary Shteyngart along with Canadian publisher Anna Porter.
The longlist for the $50,000 prize (in Canadian currency) will be unveiled on September 4th and the shortlist will be announced on October 1st. The winner will be revealed at a gala ceremony at Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton.
Here’s more from the release: “For the second year in a row, Kobo has generously donated its Kobo Touch e-reader to members of the 2012 jury panel. The Scotiabank Giller Prize encourages publishers to provide digital copies of its submitted titles in addition to material-bound copies.” (Via National Post)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Today the organizers of the Scotiabank Giller Prize revealed that Gary Shteyngart had joined the three-person jury for the 2012 prize. The satirist posted on Twitter: “CanLit authors, please suck up to me!”
Shteyngart will work with novelist Roddy Doyle and Canadian publisher Anna Porter. The longlist for the $50,000 prize (in Canadian currency) will be unveiled on September 4th and the shortlist will be announced on October 1st. The winner will be revealed at a gala ceremony at Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton.
Here’s more from the release: “For the second year in a row, Kobo has generously donated its Kobo Touch e-reader to members of the 2012 jury panel. The Scotiabank Giller Prize encourages publishers to provide digital copies of its submitted titles in addition to material-bound copies.” (Via National Post)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 5/25/2011
Blog:
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Jeff Howe has partnered with The Atlantic to relaunch the online book club, One Book, One Twitter.
Howe explained in the announcement: “I’d always intended to relaunch One Book, One Twitter … It has a new name—1book140—but what hasn’t changed is the global, participatory nature of the affair: The crowd is still in charge.”
Twitter readers will choose the book to read in the online book club. You can still vote on the following titles: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, The Keep by Jennifer Egan, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead. Reading will commence on June 1st.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
