‘The Ode Less Travelled / The Bed Potato / Interview with Philip Deaver / Interview with Stephen King / Cohen Awards

“The Ode Less Travelled”
In his review of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, David Orr takes on Robin Williams’ version of the English teacher John Keating in the movie Dead Poets Society, as well as Dr. J. Evans Pritchard. “As Samuel Johnson put it more than 250 years ago, anyone attempting to discuss ‘the minuter parts of literature’ usually ends up either ‘frighting us with rugged science, or amusing us with empty sound.’” Then Orr tells how Fry does neither.

The Bed Potato
Attempting never to leave his bed, Gary Shteyngart reviews the new translation of Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. Goncharov’s hero lays in bed all day. On the third day, Shteyngart writes: “Today I will tackle Oblomov, the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel.”

Interview with Philip Deaver
Nancy Zafris, the Kenyon Review’s fiction editor, conducts an intriguing interview with Philip Deaver, who wrote Silent Retreats, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Deaver talks about craft. Read him talking about the influences on his writing: “Have you ever read John Updike’s “A Constellation of Events,” a little story buried down in his Trust Me collecdtion? The last lines kill me. Then there’s the Morrisons’ accident in Dan Chon’s “Among the Missing.” And Ann Beattie’s second swing past her mother’s house in “Find and Replace,” and her delicious little story “Waiting,” when the dog lazily comes out onto the front porch. Alice Dark’s “In the Gloaming”–those who’ve read it will remember the father saying to the mother, ‘Tell me about my son.’ Tobias Wolff’s “Powder,” Richard Ford’s “Reunion,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Carver’s “Cathedral” and “Errand.” I like these stories for the amazing moments they gave me. There are hundreds of others.” You also can read his story “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder.”

PR Interview Stephen King
In the fall issue of the Paris Review, Stephen King talks about fiction and his approaches: “I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, What are we afraid of as humans? Chaos. the outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that’s what I’m interested in. I mean: There are a lot of people whose writing I really love–one fo them is the American poet Philip Booth–who writes about ordinary life straight up, but I just can’t do that.”

Cohen Awards
The 2006 Cohen Awards for the best poem and short story in the previous year’s issues of Ploughshares were given to Laura Kasischke for story “If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane…” and R.T. Smith for his poem “Dar He.”

Penn Writers Conference

Penn Writers Conference
Susan Stranahan will give the keynote address at the Twelfth Annual Writers Conference at Penn. The program offers two days of two-hour workshops and master classes. To sign up for the conference go to www.pennwritersconference.org or call 215-898-6479 extension 3. SNR’s Joseph Conlin will conduct one of the workshops on Saturday, “Submitting to Literary Magazines.”

Poets Awarded / ‘New’ Frost Poem / Burnside on Non-Fiction

Poets Awarded
Carl Phillips recently received the Academy of American Poets’ Academy Fellowship, receiving $25,000. The academy selected the poet based on his work during the past 20 years.

MacArthur Fellowship winner and Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University John Hollander will be the new Poet Laureate for Connecticut starting next year. The 76-year-old poet will succeed Maryilyn Nelson. The state pays $1000 a year for the position.

Meanwhile the Poetry Foundation has named Jack Prelutsky as the First Children’s Poet Laureate, a $25,000 prize.

Frost Poem Discovered
The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) next week will publish a poetic tribute to a friend killed during The Great War by Robert Frost. University of Virginia graduate student Robert Stilling discovered the poem while during research with some Frost papers.

Burnside on Non-Fiction
In commenting on a letter written by Sharon Olds to Laura Bush, John Burnside writes: What makes this document powerful is, in part, its stylistic elegance, as it treads the fine line between political protest and the courtesy that any civilized human being owes to others, no matter how reprehensible their actions. Its effectiveness is enhanced…by the trust that a famously rigorous poet inspires; by the authority of one whose main pursuit is not money or fame but artistic integrity.

Smith Picks Kay / Drunken Shakespeare?

Smith Picks Kay
The seventy-eight-year-old actor Bernard Kay won the New Writing Ventures award for creative non-fiction. Novelist Ali Smith, the chief judge described Kay’s memoir as “a perfectpiece of explication.”

Drunken Shakespeare?
John Sutherland writes the some experts believe that Shakespeare wrote with a hangover. Sutherland quotes Ben Jonson to make his point: “I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as a n honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which the Plyaers thought a malevolent speech.”

Let’s Ban a Book / Murakami Gets Another O’Connor / Kid Gets Deal / Bascombe Returns

Let’s Ban Some Books
It’s that time of the year when people afraid of ideas and notions that don’t appeal to their delicate sense of sensible push to ban books from libraries and schools. According to the American Library Association, groups are trying to ban 42 classics, such as the terrible To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, The Lord of the Files, 1984, Beloved, Ulysses, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men, Catch-22, Brave New World, Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, Song of Solomon, Heart of Darkness, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Farewell to Arms, Clockwork Orange, Gone with the Wind, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Slaughterhouse Five, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Call of the Wild, All the King’s Men, The Jungle, Invisible Man, Satanic Verses, In Cold Blood, Sons and Lovers, Naked Lunch, Cat’s Cradle, A Separate Peace, Women in Love, The Naked and the Dead, Rabbit, Run, An American Tragedy, Tropic of Cancer, and Native Son. If these books are being banned for sex and violence, then the guardians of our children’s sensibilities missed one: the Old Testament.

Murakami Gets 2nd O’Connor
Novelist Haruki Murakami won his second Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection.

Kid Gets Fantasy Deal
An eleven-year-old sends a fantasy manuscript via email to the States and gets a deal.

Bascombe Returns
The Guardian is running a portion of Richard Ford’s followup to Sportswriter’s Frank Bascombe.

Talking with Ford

Talking with Ford
“I think of the friends he has mentioned, some of them pictured on the walls of his study–Sam Shepard, Cormac McCarthy, Tobias Wolff. Maybe even John Updike. I make myself some toast and go and stand on the lawn overlooking hte bay where gulls are squawking…” That’s from Phil Hogan interview with Richard Ford.

No Blarney in Her Story
I saw Kathy O’Beirne give a presentation about the life of a writer. This was long after her memoir “Don’t Every Tell” details became a best seller in Ireland and England. It’s the story of girls at the Magdalene laundry who were raped and abused by the nuns and priest responsible for their care. Long accused of lying or being dellusional, O’Beirne has fought critics. That could be changing. Read <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1879888,00.html>, an essay by Henry McDonald, Ireland editor for “The Observer.”

Shafak Acquitted
Elif Shafak was finally acquitted of “insulting Turkishness” over remarks made by a fictional character in her novel “The Bastard of Istanbul.” The charges were dropped at the request of the prosecutor. Read <http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1877748,00.html>.

Award for the Agentless / Giller Prize List / Booker List / Interviews

Award for Writers without Agents
The Sobol Literary Agency will award $100,000 to a writer of a complete novel and who is not represented by an agent. It’s a contest, and like most contests today, there’s an entry fee: $85. All entrants agree that the winner will sign Sobol as his/her agent. For more information, <www.sobolaward.com>.

Giller Prize Longlist
Fifteen Canadian authors have been listed as finalists in the annual Giller Prize: David Adams Richards for The Friends of Meager Fortune, Caroline Adderson for Pleased to Meet You, Todd Babiak for The Garneau Block, Randy Boyagoda for Governor of the Northern Province, Douglas Coupland for jPod, Alan Cumyn for The Famished Lover, Rawi Huge for De Niro’s Game, Kenneth J. Harvey for Inside, Wayne Johnston for The Custodian of Paradise, Vincent Lam for Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Annette Lapointe for Stolen, Pascale Quiviger for The Perfect Circle, Gaetan Soucy for The Immaculate Conception, Russell Wangersky for The Hour of Bad Decisions, and Carol Windley for Home Schooling.

Booker Shortlist
The Booker Shortlist has been announced: Sarah Walters for The Night Watch, Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss, Kate Grenville for The Secret River, M.J. Hyland for Carry Me Down, Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men, and Edward St. Aubyn for Mother’s Milk.

Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Gary Shteyngart
The Book Critics Circle has a wonderful interview with Chimamanda Adichie, whose first novel—Purple Hibiscus—earned her critical fame and a literary award. Her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been released. “Right now, I’m on page twenty-five of my new novel. This is a time of great terror and glee…” That’s what Gary Shteyngart has to say in his interview.

Remnick Talks / 9/11 Rehashed / The Dream State

Talking with the New Yorker’s Editor
David Remnick, the fifth editor of the 81-year-oold publication New Yorker, rescued it from its own demise. In a Guardian essay, Gaby Wood describes him as eccentric.

9/11 Rehashed
I’ve never understood humanity’s need to celebrate or to remember events on a five-year cycle, especially an event such as the destruction inflicted on innocents on 9/11/01. A while ago, the famed British author wrote “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a leader of the 9/11 attacks. If memory serves, it appeared in the New Yorker. The Observer republished it last week. This week, its parent publication has followed with an essay, “The Age of Herrorism,” in which Amis analyses the rise of Isalmic extremism and the West’s weak-ass response to it.

The Dream State
During the past several months, I have become convinced that writers, or any individual for that matter, gets the most from her/his creativity when they are closest to a dream state, as I first heard from Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize novelists as well as author of From Where You Dream, published by Grove Press, which I would recommend to any writer. Recently Michael Frayn came out with The Human Touch by Faber and Faber, and an essay from that book appears in the Guardian.

Palmer Wins Poetry Award

Palmer Wins Wallace Stevens Award
The Academy of American Poets has award Michael Palmer the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for his proven mastery of poetry. The 63-year-old poet will receive the award on November 8 at the Lang Auditorium at the New School, 55 W. 13^th St., New York City. The event is free and open to the public.