The good folks at this year’s 5-under-35 book awards at powerHouse had very nice goodie bags, including a handsome Kindle cover. Thanks, folks!
I decided to improve upon mine.
More you might like
Vote for our new tote bag in the Game of Totes contest at Electric Literature! Just enter “National Book Foundation” in the comments: http://electricliterature.com/game-of-totes-canvas-is-coming-round-one/
In Memory of Paul Fussell (1924-2012)
Paul Fussell won the National Book Award in 1976 in the Arts and Letters category for his landmark study of WWI, The Great War and Modern Memory. In his acceptance speech, Fussell said, “I would like to think that your award to this book of mine might be taken as an action inviting criticism to return to its time-honored tasks―tasks, after all, which Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot did not disdain to perform. Not transforming literary texts into mathematical formulas, but reading the humanity back into them. Recovering the actual pulse of life that beats everywhere in literature and that constantly solicits us to listen for it.”
Photo by Elaine Miller
At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.
Rachel Kushner shares her reading tendencies with the Times. Bow down. (via mcnallyjackson)
As any other story, this one begins with the Beginning; and then comes the Middle, and then the End. The rest, as a friend of mine always says, is literature: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics, and elliptics. I don’t know what comes after that. Possibly ignominy, death, and, finally, postmortem fame. At that point it will no longer be my place to say anything in the first person. I will be a dead man, a happy, enviable man.
Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth
My favorite place to read is in a dark bar mid-day. Although I can read almost anywhere, we’re each allowed our preferences and mine is so.
Juan Vidal, cultural critic and 1/3 of Rhema Soul, “A Shot And A Book: How To Read In Bars” (via NPR)
How’d you pick it? Any superstitions about the first book of the year setting the tone for the whole year?
Interesting! Mine was ‘A Stranger in Olondria,’ so perhaps it will be a year of visions and strange loves and fantastic travels. I’m choosing to think that, anyhow.
How did you start the year?
Just finished Tom McNeal’s Far Far Away, one of our 2013 YPL Finalists. Sooooo good!
It was the first year of my life sentence and I was locked in my cell in Wandsworth prison for 23 hours a day. I was without skills or abilities, but I could read. I’m sure the six books a week I was allowed from the prison library helped to keep me alive during that uncertain year, unlike the man in the cell above mine who hanged himself during my first Christmas inside.
Erwin James, a former inmate reflecting on how books kept him alive in prison.
Learn about two winners of our Innovations in Reading Prize, Chicago Books to Women in Prison and Free Minds, that help prison communities access and engage with literature.
Okay, so I’m going to try to write a book that fully explores the life of a special needs girl, two of them in fact. And I’m going to do in in alternating voices—in first person.
How do I get in the heads of people that I am not? Whose mental abilities are different that mine?
First, I have a background. I taught special needs (the upper end) in my classes when I taught high school.
Some would be able to read and some never would, but they were in my reading classes nevertheless.
I saw first hand what they could and couldn’t do. What their frustrations were and were not. How tired they became when we did the same things over and again. How they needed variety just as much if not more as the higher-functioning students did.
I learned that one thing the special needs student understood is that he or she is special needs. Knew exactly what that needs was. As Biddy puts it, what her “dys” is—her dysfunction.
These students may have a hard time learning, but they have had years to learn that they are different and that is frustrating.
I learned that not all special need students are patient, naive and kind. Some have lower boiling points than others. Some resent the attitudes that the “normal” people in society have toward them. I learned that they have coping skills that give them insight that can amaze. Or sometimes have tunnel vision and anger issues that come from their disabilities.
I did research, of course, but it kind of told me the same things that I saw in anecdotal form. I learned at what point in the I.Q. the idea of grammar and tense seems to form. I learned at what point in the I.Q. reading can happen. I learned that dysgraphia is the least diagnosed form of the spectrum. But possibly not the least prevalent.
I learned a lot of facts in my research, but I learned more from the students. I learned that inability to read or write or do more than simple math is not really the issue with most of the students.
It’s that people make assumptions about them that are not true. These students can become and will become and are now functioning members of society.
What they want most is to be appreciated for who they are.
I can write that. It’s not so different than anybody else.
(via Cynsations: Guest Post: Gail Giles, author of Girls Like Us, on Writing Across Mental Abilities)
Girls Like Us, Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
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