Year / 2007

by Richard Grayson

American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards announced

I always look forward to seeing the annual ad on the New York Times book page announcing the American Academy of Arts and Letters new members and awards recipients. Today’s the day, and although some of the awards are in music, architecture and the visual arts, many are in literature. I’m thrilled to see a passel of my favorite writers on the list:

New Academy Members
Deborah Eisenberg
Mary Gordon
Allan Gurganus
Jim Harrison
Robert Irwin
Harper Lee
Annie Proulx
Steven Stucky
Billie Tsien

Gold Medal for Fiction
John Updike

Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts
Michael R. Bloomberg

Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story
Charles Baxter

Academy Awards in Literature
Joan Acocella
Charles D’Ambrosio
Barbara Ehrenreich
David Markson
Robert Morgan
Joan Silber
William T. Vollmann
Dean Young

Benjamin H. Danks Award in Drama
Adam Rapp

E.M. Forster Award in Literature
Jez Butterworth

Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
Tony D’Souza, Whiteman

Addison M. Metcalf Award in Literature
Suji Kwock Kim

Rome Fellowships in Literature
Junot Diaz
Sarah Manguso

Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in Literature
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award in Literature
Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Congratulations, all.

Oh, and if you have never seen the Academy’s gorgeous headquarters, along with its sister institutions, on Audubon Terrace in way upper Manhattan, you owe it to yourself to visit this architectural marvel some summer afternoon.

by Tao Lin

The Confused Manatee and Bear829

The confused manatee wakes at 3 p.m. most days and begins writing at 10 p.m. after drinking a double espresso with soy milk. The confused manatee is unemployed. She has been rejected from Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Eclectica, Mad Hatter’s Review, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Mid-American Review, NOON, and Fourteen Hills. The confused manatee’s hobbies include finding secluded areas and staring at them, touching the covers of literary magazines, and pushing seaweed into giant floating piles and then swimming away.

Confused

Bear829 lives in Greenwich Village with three humans. He enjoys shopping at Whole Foods, doing push-ups in his room, and petting his own head while saying, “It will be okay. It will be okay.” He emails his mother once a day.

Bear829

by Antoine Wilson

The Big Idea

For the past ten years I have been looking for a forum in which to express my one big idea.

I believe I have finally found that forum.

Here is the idea:

In the television show Land of the Lost, the character of Chaka (pictured above) functions as a physical manifestation of the incest taboo.

For Marshall, Will, and Holly, the choice is simple. Either continue searching for a way home, or give up and, er, found a new civilization. Chaka’s presence keeps them searching.

[what, ed, no “incest” tag?]

by Dave White

Who Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?

Whenever I sit down and I read a really good book, I think I want to be someone else. There are days where I want to be Duane, Ray Banks, Al Guthrie, or Laura Lippman (all right let’s be honest, I want to write like Laura… but don’t have the guts to go through all the operations to actually become Laura).

I envy these writers a lot of times because each one does things differently and they do them all well. They write their way. And I want to write like them. But I can’t. I don’t write that way. It wouldn’t come out of me well. And then I get mad. Why not? I ask. Why can’t I write like them?

And that’s when I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that as a writer, I don’t want to be Duane or Ray or Al or Laura. And I shouldn’t. They are entities unto themselves.

So I should want to be Dave White.

And that’s what I think a lot of the best writers do (and I know this is opening up a whole can of worms… NO I DO NOT THINK I AM ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS. BUT I AM STRIVING….) I think they find their own voice.

Yeah, they imitated those they liked when they first started (Parker imitated Chandler, Leonard-Hemingway) but they moved on from that. They moved away and found their own voice.

So my goal is not to be the next so and so… it’s to be the first Dave White…

Unless you count the Dave White who reviews movies.

Or the Dave White who was in Bewitched…

or…

(this is just a way to say BUY THE BOOKS that I just mentioned! They’re great!)