I was lucky enough, in graduate school, to befriend a large congregation of selfless folks who went on to teach; some in the jungles of elementary and high schools; some in private schools, some in higher ed. I was not, however, brave or patient enough for this occupation, but what I learned from my fellow classmates and from those fine educators I was lucky enough to have over the years, left an impact on me, even if they didn’t know it.

Good or bad, fondly or grudgingly remembered, teachers leave indelible impressions on us all and for this week’s picks, we want to honor them.

What about you, LitStackers? What lessons did you learn from your favorite teachers? Tell us all about it in the comments.

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The very first trailer for the Lion’s Gate movie adaptation of Ender’s Game has debuted.

From this trailer the movie looks to be a by-the-numbers action flick that tells you in no uncertain terms that these kids are being trained to command fleets against a proven alien threat and that Ender is the best amongst them all. (The trailer even ends with Ender lining an entire fleet up… then taking it out in one shot.)

The brilliance of this straightforward approach is that it presents a different reality to you depending on your age and how much you know about the source material.

In the trailer, Ender is portrayed as A Very Special Boy. He’s the most gifted kid in a group of gifted kids that have to use their smarts and skills to save the planet. I’m not sure it’s even possible to set someone up for a more heroic role, and if I was a kid I’d undoubtedly see myself as Ender in a heartbeat. The trailer assists this reaction by having Ender say very little, keeping any specific characterization at bay and making Ender more of a template to insert yourself into.

Check out Chris Lough‘s full reaction post on the trailer here.

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Source: Wicked Clothes

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Quirk Books, Drexel University’s Urban Playground and Dragon Jedi staged a few scenes from William Shakespeare’s Star Wars outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently.

Below, we’ve embedded a video of the reenactment. Museum goers were surprised by Star Wars costumes, R2D2 and “a number of weaponized baguettes.” Here’s more about Ian Doescher‘s book, coming in July:

Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays … Reimagined in glorious iambic pentameter—and complete with twenty gorgeous Elizabethan illustrations–William Shakespeare’s Star Wars will astound and edify Rebels and Imperials alike. Zounds! This is the book you’re looking for.

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In honor of the famed author of The Haunting of House and the seminal short story, “The Lottery,” the Shirely Jackson Awards focuses on works of literature which approach the fantastic and are often horror-themed. Spanning all publishing spheres, these awards frequently recognize literary and genre writers alike.

The nominees for the 2012 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL

• The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (ROC)
• The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
• Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
• Immobility, Brian Evenson (Tor)

NOVELLA

• 28 Teeth of Rage, Ennis Drake (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• Delphine Dodd, S.P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• I’m Not Sam, Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee (Sinister Grin Press/ Cemetery Dance Publications)
• The Indifference Engine, Project Itoh (Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC)
• “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

NOVELETTE

• “The Crying Child,” Bruce McAllister (originally “The Bleeding Child,” Cemetery Dance #68)
• “The House on Ashley Avenue,” Ian Rogers (Every House is Haunted, ChiZine Publications)
• “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)
• “Wild Acre,” Nathan Ballingrud (Visions, Fading Fast, Pendragon Press)
• “The Wish Head,” Jeffrey Ford (Crackpot Palace, William Morrow)

SHORT FICTION

• “Bajazzle,” Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)
• “How We Escaped Our Certain Fate,” Dan Chaon (21^st Century Dead, St. Martin’s)
• “Little America,” Dan Chaon (Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)
• “The Magician’s Apprentice,” Tamsyn Muir (Weird Tales #359)
• “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)
• “Two Houses,” Kelly Link (Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

• Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
• Errantry, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
• The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing)
• Remember Why You Fear Me, Robert Shearman (ChiZine Publications)
• The Woman Who Married a Cloud, Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean Press)
• Windeye, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

• 21^st Century Dead, edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s)
• Black Wings II, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing)
• Exotic Gothic 4:  Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)
• Night Shadows, edited by Greg Herren and J. M.  Redmann (Bold Strokes Books)
• Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle (William Morrow)

The 2012 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 14^th at Readercon 24, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.  Readercon 24 Guest of Honor, Maureen McHugh, will act as host.

More info here.

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Some people wear their emotions — like a love of books — on their sleeves. And with literary T-shirts they can do that literally. Some feature books’ covers, others text, and others pay tribute to beloved authors.

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In the appendix to his brief but radiant 2010 manifesto ‘Reality Hunger’—a supremely confident and practically pedagogical collage of quotations and personal observations published in order to define a perceived new age of literature—David Shields writes with this kind of over-excited, unnecessarily aggressive tone. He’s explaining why those hundreds of quotes were used throughout his book without any acknowledgement of their sources.

…I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you have read is not just a bug but a feature.

A major focus of ‘Reality Hunger’ is approbation and plagiarism and what these terms mean… However, Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations; the list follows…

If you would like to restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read, simply grab a sharp pair of scissors or a razor blade or box cutter and remove pages 207-221 [the citations, which immediately follow the appendix] by cutting along the dotted line [which Shields actually published on those pages].

Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do—all of us—though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.Stop; don’t read any farther.”

 We could wonder why Shields, after constructing a text which he intended to be the ‘Ars Poetica’ for early-21^st-century artists, was still concerned enough to remind us that the scissors should be sharp. Or why he spent 200 pages tapping into the wealth of Western wisdom and then felt such an urgent need to, I guess, sum things up—to make a somewhat politically tinged statement like “Reality cannot be copyrighted.” Or why he decided to use that one-size-fits-all Picasso quote, “Art is theft,” both as one of the book’s epigraphs and as one of the introductory lines of the tenth chapter. Why the fuck would you use it twice?

But, this week, I’d rather use Shields’ argument as the backdrop for a brief ramble on the first chapter of Book XII of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel ‘Tom Jones’—a novel that, along with helping to spark a new era of long-form fiction, employed a mixture of criticism, personal essay and narrative similar to what Shields seems now to be calling for in his manifesto (albeit within a very different context, of course, and not in quite the same way). And, funny enough, this particular chapter begins with almost exactly the same leading thought used by Shields to begin his appendix.

 The learned reader must have observed that in the course of this mighty work I have often translated passages out of the best ancient authors, without quoting the original or without taking the least notice of the book from whence they were borrowed.”

In this case, Fielding is really just talking about his use of Greek and Latin passages, either for strictly his own purposes or through the mouths of his variously virtuous, erudite and purely zany characters. But his aim in first employing the uncited quotations and then explaining to the reader his reasoning is really the same as Shields’; it just so happens that he’s doing it within the defining years of different modern age.

I think it’s kind of weird that Shields wrote that whole book without once addressing Fielding’s ideas, or referencing him in any way. Maybe because the ideas weren’t quite hip enough for Shields’ purposes (which is kind of a bullshit reason), maybe he forgot, or maybe he’s just never read him. I think it’s the first—bullshit—reason. So, let’s see what exactly Fielding had to say, and we’ll notice once again how similar his tone can be to someone writing in protest of digital-age copyright laws over 250 years later. Here, he’s justifying his use of Greek and Latin quotes without acknowledging their sources.

 …The ancients may be considered as a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his Muse. Or, to place it in a clearer light, we moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich…

 In like manner are the ancients, such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and the rest, to be esteemed among the writers as so many wealthy squires, from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an immemorial custom of taking whatever we come at. This liberty I demand and this I am as ready to allow again to my poor neighbors in their turn…

 Nay, I absolutely claim a property in all such sentiments the moment they are transcribed into my writings, and I expect all readers henceforwards to regard them as purely and entirely my own.”

 One could say that Fielding and Shields are in fact equally aggressive in defense of what they see as their liberty, freedom, property, etc. Except that Fielding, to his credit I think, doesn’t take the slightly more manic route of attempting to directly co-opt the reader—he expects readers to respect his personal authorial boundaries, rather than imploring them to rebel against the current practice of his publisher.

But Shields probably didn’t feel like mentioning any of this because Fielding’s declaration stops far short of aligning with ideals of the totally free sharing, remix, sampling culture the hippest cats are currently trying to push. Which makes sense, because he was writing in fucking 1749.

Fielding draws the line at pulling uncited text from work published by his contemporaries, whom he considers just as “poor” as himself, and unable to afford a petty theft quite as easily as Homer or Horace.

 …all I require of my brethren, is to maintain the same strict honesty among ourselves which the mob show to one another. To steal from one another is indeed highly criminal and indecent; for this may strictly styled defrauding the poor (sometimes perhaps those who are poorer than ourselves) or, to see it under the most opprobrious colours, robbing the spital.”

Basically, Fielding was defining his conception of a strictly literary sense of public domain, right around the same time that copyright law and the general notion of a legal public domain were entering European society. It was definitely fresh stuff to the first readers of ‘Tom Jones,’ especially coming in such a forceful tone from the author—but I guess the truth is that now, to people like Shields, this firmly delineated thinking represents some kind of satanic opposition to the new age 21^st-century, all-access sharing, genre mish-mash, fiction/non-fiction supreme, essay remix whatever that we’re all supposed to be clamoring for if we want to call ourselves good critics or writers.

Or maybe Shields just never read the book. Who the fuck knows. Maybe I should ask him someday. He probably wouldn’t want to talk about it. I’d probably have to start talking about something else and then try to weasel it into the conversation. Kind of like sampling, I guess. Who knows.

I do have to say, of course, that it’s nice that we eventually grew out of Fielding’s idea of robbing the rich ancients and protecting the poor contemporaries. In fact, as I’m writing this I’m listening to Roland Kirk play two horns on a 1962 recording of his tribute to Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, which carries the long title of ‘Where Monk and Mingus Live/Let’s Call This’ (the second half of which is a Monk tune). It’s better than electronic sampling—but what the fuck do I know? All I know is that, for all our gripes about 21^st-century culture—most of which are probably purposely ironic and disingenuous anyway—it’s nice to live the era of access. Sure, I would’ve rather had the chance to buy Roland Kirk a drink; but at least now I can pretend I once knew him.

That’s the illusion, right? Shields never actually met Montaigne, right?

The post OpEd: The Varying Poverties of Now appeared first on LitStack.

Author Dennis Lehane has won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best Novel with Live by Night.

You can read free samples of all the Edgar Award nominees below, highlighting the winning books in bold.

Among the winners, Ben Winters won best paperback original with The Last Policeman and Chris Pavone won the best first novel by an american author with The Expats.

Free Samples of the Edgar Award Winners Nominees for 2013

Novel

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)
The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Sunset by Al Lamanda (Gale Cengage Learning – Five Star)
All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley (Penguin Group USA – Riverhead Books)

Best First Novel

The Expats by Chris Pavone (Crown Publishers)
The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (Random House Publishing- Ballantine)
Don’t Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman (Minotaur Books – Thomas Dunne Books)
Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal (Random House Publishing- Bantam Books)
The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Reagan Arthur)
Black Fridays by Michael Sears (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Best Paperback Original
The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books)
Complication by Isaac Adamson (Soft Skull Press)
Whiplash River by Lou Berney (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow Paperbacks)
Bloodland by Alan Glynn (Picador)
Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books – Emily Bestler Books)

Best Fact Crime
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French (Penguin Group USA – Penguin Books)
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King (HarperCollins Publishers – Harper)
More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers’ Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered by D.P. Lyle, MD (Medallion Press)
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre (Crown Publishers)
The People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo – and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar Straus & Giroux Originals)

Best Critical/Biographical
The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics by James O’Brien (Oxford University Press)
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed by John Paul Athanasourelis (McFarland and Company)
Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books – Emily Bestler Books)
In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero edited by Otto Penzler (Smart Pop)

Best Short Story
“The Unremarkable Heart” – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Karin Slaughter (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
“Iphigenia in Aulis” – An Apple for the Creature by Mike Carey (Penguin Group USA – Ace Books)
“Hot Sugar Blues” – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Steve Liskow (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
“The Void it Often Brings With It” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Tom Piccirilli (Dell Magazines)
“Still Life No. 41″ – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Teresa Solana (Dell Magazines)

Best Juvenile
The Quick Fix by Jack D. Ferraiolo (Abrams – Amulet Books)
Fake Mustache: Or, How Jodie O’Rodeo and Her Wonder Horse (and Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election from a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind by Tom Angleberger (Abrams – Amulet Books)
13 Hangmen by Art Corriveau (Abrams – Amulet Books)
Spy School by Stuart Gibbs (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dial Books for Young Readers)

Young Adult

Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak (Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group – Roaring Brook Press)
The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George (Penguin Young Readers Group – Viking)
Crusher by Niall Leonard (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte BFYR)
Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dutton Children’s Books)
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (Disney Publishing Worldwide – Hyperion)

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NEW YORK — Harper Lee, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” filed a lawsuit Friday to re-secure the copyright to it.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan seeks unspecified damages from the son-in-law of Lee’s former literary agent and companies he allegedly created.

The lawsuit alleges the son-in-law, Samuel Pinkus, failed to properly protect the copyright of the book after his father-in-law, Eugene Winick – who had represented Lee as a literary agent since the book was published in 1960 through the firm McIntosh and Otis – became ill a decade ago. The 87-year-old author alleges Pinkus took advantage of her declining hearing and eyesight seven years ago to get her to assign the book’s copyright to him and a company he controlled.

Lee, who lives in Monroeville, Ala., has taken legal action to get the copyright reassigned but alleges Pinkus still received commissions.

“The transfer of ownership of an author’s copyright to her agent is incompatible with her agent’s duty of loyalty; it is a gross example of self-dealing,” the lawsuit says.

The former agent’s son-in-law didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer for fiction and is widely assigned in schools. The film version won three Academy Awards.

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Four-year-old Regina loves to spin stories about dinosaurs, pirates, and dragons, and her father decided to illustrate the stories. You can help them print their book, fund an Emily the Strange music video, pre-order a neat hydroponic planter, or lend a hand to musicians Anamanaguchi and their video game-inspired music.

This sounds like a sweet father-daughter project. The Dragon Book is a book of stories written by 4-year-old Regina, and drawn by her dad, 30-year-old Michael. They’re hoping not only to print the book, but also to donate copies to libraries and hospitals. For a mere $1 pledge, you’ll receive a PDF of the book. For a $15 pledge, you’ll also receive a signed physical copy as well as a PDF of all the line art for your coloring enjoyment. Check out one of the trailers below.

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