Content Tagged ‘river bend chronicle’

It was an especially exciting week at Lookout HQ with the launch of Clare Beams’s story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, on Tuesday. The Lookout team has been hard at work on this amazing book for quite some time, and it’s been fun to see it getting the attention it so deserves. Here are a few of the special places you can read more about it.

The story “All the Keys to All the Doors” was featured in Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading this week, with a fantastic introduction from Megan Mayhew Bergman: “Upon reading her, you make it to the third or fourth paragraph and realize this is not the restrained narrative you expected, that there is a cutting strangeness and profundity afoot.”

Clare got a bunch of love in Pittsburgh, the town she calls home, including this interview in the Pittsburgh City Paper, this review in the Pittsburgh Tribune, and a packed release party at the White Whale Bookstore.

And if you haven’t heard by now, she also got love from O, The Oprah Magazine, where it was featured as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.”

This coming week, Wilmington will host its own special launch party for Clare as part of Writers’ Week on Monday night. To read more about it–and the other fabulous writers coming to Wilmington including Mei Fong, Maurice Manning, and Chinelo Okparanta–check out this article from Encore.

Speaking of hometown love, Wilmington’s Salt Magazine did a fabulous profile on Lookout and Honey from the Lion, saying, “The care and adoration lavished on a Lookout book is obvious…. French flaps, beautiful graphic design, and tailored page layouts are the hallmarks of a book that someone cares about…. At Lookout, each book radiates that level of care.” And Parnassus Books created this roundup of “Small Presses: Little Gems With Big Impact,” calling out Lookout books by Clare Beams, Edith Pearlman, and Matthew Neill Null. (Thanks, you guys!)

There’s good news for other Lookout authors, too! Matthew Neill Null’s novel, Honey from the Lion, has been named a fiction finalist in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and has sold to Albin Michel for publication in France in 2018. Oui oui!

And Ben Miller, author of the memoir River Bend Chronicle, accepted the Cornell College Leadership & Service Award for “contributions to American literature.” Ben’s acceptance speech is funny and inspiring, and we’re so happy for him.

And there are book launches in the world of Ecotone contributors to boot! Melissa Range’s new poetry collection, Scriptorium, hit the shelves this month. Chosen by Tracy K. Smith for the 2015 National Poetry Series, it’s now available from Beacon Press.

Issue 21 contributor Safiya Sinclair’s book of poetry, Cannibal, which came out last month, got a shout out on Lenny: “Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed.”

This is the post that nearly launched a thousand books. We hope your reading all the great new literature you can handle–thanks for checking out ours!

Ben Miller’s memoir-in-essays, River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa was published by Lookout in 2013. He sent us this update about life after his Radcliffe Fellowship and a cross-country move for our regular department On Location, where writers share a picture of a meaningful place.

After completing my fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute in May, I made a spinning leap from Cambridge to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and landed on my feet in front of the celebratory mural in Meldrum Park created in 2013 by artist Dave Loewenstein and the children of the Whittier Neighborhood. Squeezed in my left hand is a manuscript containing the sixty-one new translations of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” that I gathered over the last year from generous poets around the globe. It is my dream to hold a park reading at which this tiny poem of vast vision will be delivered in each of the 143 languages currently spoken in homes in Sioux Falls. Any translator interested in participating, please e-mail me at muralspeaks@gmail.com! I am in particular need of translations of the poem in African and Asian languages.

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: the Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa. His prose is forthcoming in the New England Review and the St. Petersburg Review. His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. On October 17 in Hooksett, New Hampshire, he will be presenting shrub-based polyphony in front of the New England chapter of the International Lilac Society. Selected works from his ongoing collaboration with the painter Dale Williams can be seen very soon in Brooklyn.

UNCW is back in session, and so is our weekly Lit News Roundup. We hope that our readers had a wonderful and restful holiday season.

We highly recommend reading this thoughtful and inspiring Slate article by Daniel Menaker, who writes, “The profession, in whatever form, will continue to produce physical and now electronic objects that move not only units but people. Move them and enlighten them emotionally, move them to action, move them to share what they learn and care about with others.”

© Laura van den Berg

In case you missed the cover of the Sunday Book Review on January 4, it featured a stunning review by Laura van den Berg of Honeydew (Little, Brown), the new collection by Lookout’s debut author, Edith Pearlman (Binocular Vision). A profile of Mrs. Pearlman, written by another Lookout author, Steve Almond, also appeared in the Times and chronicles her writing and publishing background, leading to her “commercial breakthrough at seventy-eight, after five decades of writing short stories, some 200 of them, nearly all appearing in small literary magazines.” The profile includes a quote by Lookout co-founder and former editor Ben George.

As always in our weekly Lit News, we round up the headlines and vital discussions in literature and publishing arts, and also announce Lookout and Ecotone author kudos.

Emma Straub suggested “Ten Books To Read If You’re Not Traveling This Summer” for Publishers Weekly and included at #3 Arcadia by Lauren Groff, who has a story in Astoria to Zion.

More than dudes in tights or self-indulgent autobiography: at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Anne Elizabeth Moore considers journalistic nonfiction comics from California, Iceland, and Japan.

Ben Miller, author of last year’s debut memoir in essays, River Bend Chronicle, has been selected as one of Radcliffe’s 2014–15 fellows and will have a year at Harvard’s institute for advanced study to shape a manuscript extending his investigation of the urban Midwest. Congratulations, Ben!

Last night at One Story’s annual Literary Debutante Ball in Brooklyn, two Ecotone contributors made their book debuts. Congrats to Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans, and Ben Stroud, author of Byzantium. We hope you both did it up last night! 

As always in our weekly Lit News, we open with a little eye candy and then round up the relevant headlines and important discussions taking place around literature and publishing. We also announce Lookout and Ecotone author accolades, and remind you of what you might have missed on the blog that week.

Thanks to our friends over at Pomegranate Books in Wilmington for this terrific display of our IPPY-winning story anthology Astoria to Zion. Stop by to see it for yourself and don’t forget to buy an armload of books while you’re there. (Booksellers, send a photo of a Lookout title on display in your store, and we’ll post it here.)

Farewell, and brava! This week marks the end of Natasha Trethewey’s tenure as U.S. poet laureate, a position that she has held for the past two years.

Because I was determined that my life be about more than my worst hours on earth —River Bend Chronicle by Ben Miller

Type treatment by Eric Tran, Lookout Intern

Ben Miller has a playlist for his memoir, River Bend Chronicle, up at Largehearted boy, a music blog that also has interest in the literary world. Here are some of our personal favorites from the list:

“Carry On Wayward Son” – composed by Kerry Livgren – performed by Kansas

Sudlow Junior High lunch room. Again I’ve beaten the rest of the losers to our table because I don’t push my flab through the line anymore. I bring an apple only. The words of this, my latest eating theme, runs over and over in my aching head. There will be peace when you are done. That is, finish what I am starting.

“Moonshadow” – composed by Cat Stevens – performed by Cat Stevens

When the anger bubble bursts there’s the quiet of this hymn – blue bringing blue out of black and black bringing black out of blue. Prayer prowling in a pulp grotto. Melody configuring my sensation of being shipped through weeks like a box not sealed, stuff spilling out…phosphorescence of spent emotion behind the postman, eyes calmly rolling on a sidewalk, mouth a tired rubber band draped over a curb.

“Free Man in Paris” – composed by Joni Mitchell – performed by Joni Mitchell

In her I heard the ire of my sisters reborn as direction, heard a mother’s keen reformed or resolved – ebullient demise of conflicted voices and the paralysis. “Alive,” she sang to my head on a pillow of notebooks. “Alive and unfettered.”

How was your weekend? On Friday we had a (belated) picnic to celebrate the release of Ben Miller’s River Bend Chronicle. Thanks, Ben, for the tasty bubbly!

“Miller’s prose throughout combines that knack for close observation and gently mocking tone, such as when he romanticizes his neighbor Mr. Hickey but bemusedly remembers how the man’s sister tried to equip him with a gun. His mother comes in for the harshest treatment, as he catalogs her self-martrying attitude and emotional disorganization, symbolized by a massive handbag he calls Moby Purse.”

Read the rest here!

Happy Publication Day, Ben Miller! We are so proud!