Check it out: “In Lerner’s hilarious and sensitive novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, a young poet named Adam Gordon plays a deeply identifiable (self-doubting, pretentious, plagued-by-his-moment-in-history) fool. Lerner’s three previous books of (marvellous) poetry were no doubt the training ground for his incredible sensitivity to the nuances of thought, for his beautiful and flawless sentences, and for his power to evoke scenes in the mind. The book is short, but so dense and full of life and feeling.”

Heather Christle won The Believer Poetry Award for her collection, The Trees The Trees.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here’s an excerpt, pondering the changes that occurred since DeWitt published “The Last Samurai” in 2000: “Unfortunately, here at the other end of that same decade, readers are still waiting for DeWitt’s second novel … This, in a nutshell, is the problem of the aughts. Will all of these newly indispensable textual forms ever lend themselves to actual books, or are they simply ends in themselves? (DeWitt has said that she temporarily had to move into an Internet-less apartment in order to get work done; according to her blog, she spent 2009 trying to finish five different books.)”

What do you think? Is the Internet ruining our chances at writing books? Will reading GalleyCat spoil the next Great American Novel? These are somewhat exaggerated questions, but even this editor dreams about an Internet-less apartment sometimes…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.