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| Visit citypaper.net/writingcontest for more information. |
Rules
Fiction: Stories should be 3,000 words or less and previously unpublished. No more than one submission per entrant.
Poetry: One entry can consist of up to five poems.
Eligibility: Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware residents are invited to participate. Employees and regular freelancers for the City Paper are ineligible, obvs.
Prizes: Winning story and poem will be published in the Dec. 31, 2009, issue of City Paper and featured in a reading. Top two runners-up will be published at citypaper.net. Additional prizes TBA.
Deadline: We must receive your work before 5 p.m. on Fri., Dec. 11. No exceptions.
Entering
Please include a processing fee of $5 made payable to City Paper Writing Contest at the address below or via PayPal to paypal@citypaper.net. Stories should be e-mailed to gimmefiction@citypaper.net or mailed the old-fashioned way to:
City Paper Writing Contest
123 Chestnut St., Third Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19106.
No phone calls please regarding specific entries. Manuscripts will not be returned.
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Yep, City Paper's annual Writing Contest is on, and this year, poetry is back in the mix. Submissions are due Dec. 11. There's lots more info here (and below, after the jump). But right now I'm happy to announce our judges!
Poetry Judge: Thomas Devaney! Devaney is a Penn prof who can be seen and heard on and in The Inquirer, 88.5 FM, Kelly Writer's House and books like A Series of Small Boxes and Letters to Ernesto Neto. Lots more info here.
Fiction Judge: Elise Juska! Juska has taught at UArts, The New School and such. She's the author of : One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, The Hazards of Sleeping Alone and more. You can also read her in the Inky, Esquire and every litmag on the planet. Lots more info here.
Fiction: Stories should be 3,000 words or less and previously unpublished. No more than one submission per entrant.
Poetry: One entry can consist of up to five poems.
Eligibility: Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware residents are invited to participate. Employees and regular freelancers for the City Paper are ineligible, obvs.
Prizes: Winning story and poem will be published in the Dec. 31, 2009 issue of City Paper and featured in a reading. Top two runners up will be published on citypaper.net Additional prizes TBA.
Deadline: We must receive your work before 5 p.m. on Fri., Dec. 11. No exceptions.
Please include a processing fee of $5 made payable to City Paper Writing Contest at the address below or via PayPal to paypal@citypaper.net. Stories should be e-mailed to gimmefiction@citypaper.net or mailed the old-fashioned way to:
City Paper Writing Contest
123 Chestnut St., Third Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19106.
No phone calls please regarding specific entries. Manuscripts will not be returned.
Know what? Let's do some FAQ.
I'd like to submit something, but I know/am enemies with/once made out with one of the judges, can I still enter?
Yes. The judges will receive a packets of entries with all names removed.
Can I submit to both the poetry and fiction contests?
Ooh, a double threat. Go for it, Shakespeare, but you gotta pay twice.
My poems have already been on a web site where, like, writers gather to critique each other's shizz. That okay?
Yes. It's cool. You were workshopping. That's fine. Shizz.
I see that your fiction contest has a 3,000 word maximum. Can I bend that a little, say to 3,300?
Sure. We're not going to be, like, sitting around counting words. But if it's obviously overlong, we might have some trouble.
Hi, only just now saw the poetry contest. Any chance I could still submit? Thanks, Julia.
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| Viking, $27.95, Nov. 3 |
From Audacity's jacket blurb:
This is the ultimate insider story of what many consider the most brilliant campaign ever run, by the man who helped design it and made it happen. Plouffe takes readers from the campaign's tenative first moments — the hard decisions on whether and how to run — to the powerful election day vindication of Obama's wins over John McCain in battlegrounds such as Virginia and Florida. Moving through a cross-country backdrop of hotel rooms, debate halls, rallies and airplanes, we follow candidate Obama and his team every step of the way, listening in on never-before-revealed discussions about bold decisions and directions, and how the campaign was reported.
Middle-of-the-book pictures of Barack on a plane, Barack on a podium, Barack on the phone might not be sexy, but the story's certainly got some meat to it. To win a copy, answer me this:
On Tuesday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart came up with what fake name for Plouffe's book?
E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.
Did you ever get your car back?
Book Quarterly Giveaway Week is coming to a close, and since Tuesday was giveaway-less, we're tripling our efforts today to make up for it.
In the pages of last week's very-wild Book Quarterly, you'll find reviews of Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked; David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries; and Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. Our critics swooned over these titles, so we figured it'd be nice to share.
But before we do, read snippets of the reviews:
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Bicycle Diaries: "David Byrne doesn't ride a fixie. Nor is he training for the Tour de France. Instead, the former Talking Head represents an oft-forgotten segment of the biking population: commuters who also like to leisurely explore neighborhoods from their banana seats. And Byrne is a famous musician with a folding bike, so he gets around. Bicycle Diaries collects his observations biking in about 15 cities, including Berlin, Buenos Aires and his home base of New York. (No chapter on Philly, sadly.) Everywhere he goes, Byrne maintains an open curiosity about his surroundings, delivered in a smart yet unfussy writing style that isn't far removed from his lyrics." —Michael Pelusi
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Juliet, Naked: "Annie, railing against a partner she never loved and his obsessive-compulsive devotion to forgotten rock 'n' roller Tucker Crowe, posts an against-the-grain review of a recently released Tucker album. Her successful, if unorthodox, analysis drives her boyfriend into the arms of another woman and, like a magnet, sucks Tucker out of his 20-year silence, straight into her English orbit. During those lost years, Tucker surrounded himself with ex-wives who pity him and children who don't know him. His loneliness, like Annie's, just slowly happened as life went on around him. Recognizing kindred spirits, Annie and Tucker sweetly and powerfully begin making up for lost time." —Char Vandermeer
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The Lacuna: "A lacuna, Kingsolver's powerful new novel explains, is 'an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things,' and Harrison Shepherd, 11, dragged from 1929 America by his husband-hunting mother, finds one offshore in Mexico. When tides cooperate, his underwater passage leads to a secret opening in the nearby jungle. Later, when Harrison mixes plaster, cooks, types for Diego Rivera and becomes Frida Kahlo's confidant, he defines lacuna as 'a missing piece, a hole in the story.' Kingsolver's no name-dropper: The passionate painters appear long before they're identified, and Harrison's lack of ego — he journals in third person — makes him a wise, incisive observer." —Mark Cofta
To win a copy of one of these three books, answer this BQ-related (that's a hint) trivia question:
Maurice Sendak is working on a new children's book. What's the working title?
E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net, and be sure to tell me which book you'd like. One book per winner. Thanks for playing!
[...] Get Lit: Byrne! Kingsolver! Hornby! :: The Clog :: Blog Archive … [...]
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| Hyperion, 288 pp., $25.99, Oct. 12 |
In anticipation of Eoin Colfer's talk tonight at the Free Library, we're giving away a copy of his just-out And Another Thing ⦠, a continuation of the late Douglas Adams' sci-fi masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Colfer's event (7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org) kicks off his U.S. tour — and as a special treat, the library will be giving out "Don't Panic" towels as well as special limited Hitchhiker's editions, while supplies last.
Said Colfer (whose first name is pronounced "Owen," FYI) of the Guide: "Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice. For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world."
From the novel's press release:
When last we saw Arthur Dent, our towel-toting hero had traveled the length, breadth, and depth of known, and unknown, space. No sooner had he made his way home to (one rather pleasant version) planet Earth than he discovered that it was about to be blown up ⦠again. Since 1997, Hitchhiker's fans have featured Arthur and friends dead, but now, in And Another Thing ⦠, Eoin Colfer revives Adams' beloved characters using his own brand of humor to propel them through another intergalactic screwball adventure.
To win a copy, be the first to answer this trivia question:
In City Paper's Food section last month, we asked a local bartender to reimagine what Hitchhiker's interstellar cocktail?
E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.
[...] Get Lit: Win a copy of Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing … :: The … [...]
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| Knopf, 688 pp., $26.95, Oct. 6 |
Our Book Quarterly Giveaway Week continues with A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which, as Janet Anderson points out in her City Paper review, ain't for kids — especially since it clocks in at a hefty 688 pages. Oof.
Byatt's novel, about Victorian idealists whose lives aren't quite as pristine as they'd like everyone to think, is already a best-seller in England and Canada, and was short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize. (Her 1991 novel, Possession, is a Booker winner.)
From Anderson's review:
These middle-class folks engage in the most advanced ideas of their era — socialism, Marxism, anarchism, anti-vivesectionism, theosophy, folklore analysis, women's rights, Fabianism. They celebrate a modern world of steamships, newspapers and electricity. Initially, it seems, they're living their utopian vision of human life to the fullest. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there's more afoot than individual righteousness. Family lines blur as parentage is questioned; relationships disintegrate as guilt, sex and greed enter the equation. This isn't a world opened up by enlightenment but real life, where people make bad choices, and connections between idealism and actuality lie only in the imagination.
To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:
What Roman general is the Fabian Society named after?
E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And check back with the Clog on Monday for a chance to win a copy of Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked.
[...] Get Lit: Win a copy of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book :: The … [...]
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| Doubleday, 480 pp., $27.95, Oct. 13 |
Headlining our fiction review page in this week's Book Quarterly, City Paper lit critic Justin Bauer assesses Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, Chronic City, which follows the life of "handsome, inoffensive" Manhattanite Chase Insteadman. The author of such crazy-popular works as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude focuses this time on the vapid lives of New Yorkers "wrapped in their own delusions, desires and lies." Burn.
Says Bauer of the novel, which was recently named Amazon's Best of the Month for October:
Chronic City estranges Manhattan, literalizing recessionary anxiety by choking the financial district in sinister fog and setting an elemental beast loose on Second Avenue. Lethem's charming misfit cartoon characters, adrift in this landscape, repeat Pynchonian paranoia as stoned farce, caught in virtuoso drifts of authorial free-association. Each wraps himself tight in alienation or obsession, ensuring that even should their affairs work out, they're too timid to get their own pants off.
To celebrate the BQ, and in anticipation of Lethem's upcoming talk at the Free Library, we're giving away a copy to our faithful readers. Just be the first to answer this trivia question:
Chronic City's protagonist, Chase Insteadman, was a child star on what made-up sitcom?
E-mail your answers right quick to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And remember, keep watching the Clog through next week for more BQ giveaways and trivia games.
[UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Marcos, who correctly guessed that Chase Insteadman, Chronic City protagonist, starred in a fictional sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Thanks to all who played!
[...] Get Lit: Win a copy of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City :: The Clog … [...]
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| Ballantine, Aug. 25 |
In today's Shelf Life lit column, Justin Bauer compares four novelists who grapple with notions of identity — Boualem Sansal, Rawi Hage, Michelle Huneven and Dan Chaon — with varying success.
He particularly dug Chaon's Await Your Reply:
Chaon's characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they've been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.
On one hand, Chaon's bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.
Since today feels like the kind of day we'd like to trade our identity out for someone else's (maybe someone who has Phils playoff tickets?), we're giving away a copy to the first Clog reader who can answer the following trivia question:
At which Midwestern college does Chaon teach?
E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. (Go Phils!)
L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy is in Philly this evening, giving a reading at the Free Library. A.D. Amorosi gushed about his new novel, Blood's a Rover, in CP's Kaleidoscope:
Knopf, $28.95, Sept. 22
From the snap-brim-sharp author who brought you the staccato cadences of The Black Dahlia comes what James Ellroy's called a ghastly tale of political malfeasance and bad juju. The finale to his Underworld USA trilogy, Blood's a Rover brings something scummy, cold, rapier fast and deeply corrupt: From its first pages, Ellroy comes out shooting, splashing blood across the stinking corpses of Howard Hughes' Las Vegas, Richard Nixon's 1968 run for the White House and J. Edgar Hoover's abusive grasp of the FBI.
Ellroy's latest is a whopper — some 600 pages of blood-splashing. We've got a copy to give away, and all you've gotta do is be the first to answer the following trivia question:
By what nickname is James Ellroy most commonly called?
E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win, and in the meantime, get yourself over to the Free Library.
Thu., Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.
[...] story at http://citypaper.net/blogs/clog/2009/09/24/get-lit-win-a-copy-of-james-ellroys-bloods-a-rover/ « beau brummel shoe [...]
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| Random House, 144 pp., $17, Sept. 1 |
Today we're giving away a copy of New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus' The Death of Conservatism — just in time for his talk tonight at the Central Branch of the Free Library.
Here's what freelibrary.org has to say about Tanenhaus, whose appearance tonight is part of the Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture Series:
Tanenhaus is the author of the National Book Award finalist Whittaker Chambers, a biography of the man whose accusations sparked the post-war crusade against suspected American communists. His new book, The Death of Conservatism, argues that modern conservatism is a counter-revolutionary movement with two sides: "realistsâ who believe in tradition and "revanchistsâ who often find themselves at war with the United States.
Mr. Tanenhaus will be interviewed on-stage by Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
To win a copy, answer this trivia question:
Sam Tanenhaus can be heard chatting with authors and critics on what weekly podcast?
E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.
Sam Tanenhaus reading/signing, Tue., Sept. 15, 7:30 p.m., $14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.
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