They're off...

“The inaugural shortlist of the latest literary award on the block, the Folio Prize, has been unveiled - with a strong showing by American authors.

     The prize, open to English-language writers from all around the world, pre-empts this year's Booker Prize, which is also expanding to a global level.
     The final eight books - out of 80 read by the Folio judges - span poetry, novels and short stories.
     The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on 10 March.
     On the shortlist are Red Doc by Anne Carson, Schroder by Amity Gaige, Last Friends by Jane Gardam, Benediction by Kent Haruf and The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner.
     The list is completed by A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava and Tenth of December by George Saunders. Five of the writers - Gaige, Haruf, Kushner, De La Pava and Saunders - are American or US-based. Gardam is the only English writer on the list. Carson is Canadian, and McBride is Irish.”
— Tim Masters, BBC
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top shelf

From: Christine Finlayson

“This month in keeping with our look inside publishing, I’m departing from my usual craft advice to give you my view of the new state of the industry.

     I don’t see the new shape of things as many do: the twilight of the dinosaurs, the old-thinking Big Five print publishers staggering, falling to their knees and heading for extinction as they’re overwhelmed by a nimble army of small, warm-blooded mammals whose claws are the sharp, smart, flexible tools of electronic publishing.
     It’s true that I’m a gatekeeper, a longtime member (to my surprise) of the industry establishment. But I am no worshiper of the old ways. Traditional publishing always was cost-heavy and inefficient. It’s a wonder that it worked. But the new electronic 'paradigm' is not the glorious revolution that true believers would like it to be.
     What’s happened instead is an evolution of the publishing world into a new class system, and like any class system it has winners, losers and opportunities. It’s a system that, if not recognized for what it is, will trap frustrated writers in a pit far more hopeless than the one they yearned to escape. Let’s start with a couple of cold-eyed realities.”
— Donald Maass, Writer Unboxed
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dust, jackets and pearls

Photo: Ron Roels, Niagara Falls Public Library, 1955 (via Retronaut)

typecast

From: i-club.com

“At my MFA, most of us are very young–rare is the person who is over 30–and most of us didn’t have careers before coming here. And almost all of us went to an elite college: Stanford and Yale are overrepresented; most others either went to a top 10 public university or top 10 liberal arts college. Almost all of us have degrees in English.

     Furthermore, despite our actual class background, everyone I’ve met in the creative writing world has had that upper-class polish. It’s something I noticed at Stanford: no matter your class, race, or country, within a few semesters we all started sounding the same and acting the same and operating according to the same values and principles. Top colleges whitewash you by teaching you how to ape the mannerisms of the managerial (note, I didn’t say ruling) class—it’s pretty much the main thing you’re buying with your $50k a year.
     Additionally, the people in the creative writing world tend to be very good-looking (also a class marker!).
     Whereas if you meet science fiction writers who are at the same level of their careers as us, there’s something very different about them. They always have jobs: often career-track jobs. Their degrees are generally not in English. They tend to be older. Oftentimes, they didn’t pursue writing seriously when they were in college. They’re not as polished and don’t seem to be from as affluent of a background. […]
     A major university—the recipient of tons of federal research dollars—is paying very privileged people (including me) tens of thousands of dollars to do work that is of little value (since we’re not yet that good) to mankind or society. And beyond that, there’s a whole system of grants, fellowships, professorships, etc, that only go to people who exist within the creative writing industry (i.e. not science fiction writers).
     Obviously, those things are very hard to get. I will probably never get any of them. But that’s not the point. The point is that the people who DO get them tend to be people like me: very privileged, very upper-class people. Which is absurd. And it seems like exactly the wrong way to design a system that’s meant to support art which isn’t commercially successful.
     Because, beyond even the genre/literary distinction, the creative writing industry systematically shuts out would-be literary writers who are from less-wealthy backgrounds.”
— R. H. Kanakia, Blotter Paper
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"Even if it sounds a bit cheesy, pursue your dreams.”

“Life is very full for 18-year-old Beth Reeks. Like every first-year university student she is juggling studies, a hectic social life and the challenge of living away from home for the first time.

     But unlike her peers at Exeter University, Reeks is also having to find time to finish off her third novel – and is now coping with the responsibility of being billed as one of the world's most important young role models.
     Reeks – who writes romantic fiction for young adults under the pen-name Beth Reekles – was earlier this month named by Time magazine on a list of the 16 most influential teenagers in the world alongside entertainment stars such as Lorde and Justin Bieber, sporting stars including swimmer Missy Franklin and Barack Obama's daughter Malia. […]
     For those yet to catch up with Reeks's work, she began writing love stories about teens partly because she was fed up with so many books aimed at young people being about vampires, werewolves and wizards (though she grew up on Harry Potter herself and cites JK Rowling as one of her role models).
     She self-published her first novel, The Kissing Booth, a rollicking romance set in California, on Wattpad, the story-sharing website, and watched amazed as her tale attracted 19 million readers across the globe.”
— Steven Morris, The Guardian
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"be the first beatnik on the block"

From: Retronaut

I'd love to get my hands on those "six authentic Beatnik poems." And what are "Beatnik Instructions"?

illuminating

From: Las parabras del silencio

“[The Voynich] manuscript, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has elicited enormous interest, resulting in numerous books and Internet sites with no conclusive resolution on the manuscript's origin. Even the US National Security Agency has taken an interest in its cryptic contents, and doctoral theses have been written on attempts to decipher the language of the Voynich Manuscript.

     HerbalGram's feature article by Arthur O. Tucker, PhD, and Rexford H. Talbert, titled ‘A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript,’ is based on a unique, investigative approach to understanding the strange manuscript. Past researchers have attempted to prove that the manuscript was a product of Europe, mainly because it was discovered in Italy, but also because they believed a European language to be hidden in the writing system of the text. Other theorists proposed Asian origins based on the premise that cloaked Chinese characters existed within syllabary of the Voynich Manuscript. As with many of humankind's most enduring mysteries, aliens have been implicated as well.
     Dr. Tucker — botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbariumat Delaware State University — and Mr. Talbert, a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA, decided to look first at the botanical illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript and compare them to the world's geographic plant distribution at the time of the manuscript's first recorded appearance (ca. 1576-1612).
     The similarities between a plant illustrated in the Voynich Manuscript and the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico — considered the first medical text written in the New World — propelled the authors down a path leading to the identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and 1 mineral in the manuscript from the Americas — specifically, from post-Conquest Nueva España (New Spain) and the surrounding regions.”
— Digital Journal
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