Book Markers: 10.09.14
New Prize for Comic Fiction
Writers, you have until the end of the month to get your submissions in for the new Robert Reeves $1,000 Prize in Comic Fiction, courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton and judged by the college’s Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Stories of up to 5,000 words can be sent to The Southampton Review. The fee is $15.
“We won’t even try to tell you what we’re looking for,” a release said. “The comic impulse is so widely and variously expressed in fiction that it resists definition.”
In addition to a grand, the winner, announced by Jan. 15, will be hailed at the Manhattan launch of the Review’s spring 2015 issue, in which the winning story will appear. Others making the final cut may be published in the Review’s online version. The prize’s namesake, by the way, is the founder of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at the college and the author of the comic novels “Doubting Thomas” and “Peeping Thomas.”
Gail Sheehy at BookHampton
The new BookHampton shop on Hampton Road in Southampton — smaller, tighter, somehow more browser-friendly than the old Main Street one — is already worth a visit, never mind when a writer of some renown is cracking the spine of a new book inside. That’ll be the case on Sunday at 2 p.m., when Gail Sheehy visits to read from “Daring: My Passages,” which traces her formative years, her famous work for New York magazine in the heyday of the 1970s and the publication of the best-selling “Passages,” and on up to later life and the difficulties of handling the death of her husband, the influential magazine editor Clay Felker.
Ms. Sheehy will also read at BookHampton’s Main Street, East Hampton, shop, on Saturday at 4 p.m.
And on a corrective note, Ms. Sheehy pointed out that in a Sept. 25 review of “Daring” in these pages it was inaccurately stated that she had a “lifelong” problem with alcohol. That problem surfaced only at the end of Mr. Felker’s life.
Victor Rugg’s “Everything Is”
Now for something completely different: a story of “what happens when an emissary from the bliss comes to earth to help save it from the greed and neglect of those who would exploit it.”
So says the jacket copy of Victor Rugg’s new self-published novel, “Everything Is,” which goes on to tout “an earthly conflict” that “rises to become an otherworldly experience that is in equal parts terrifying and enchanting.” This “head trip of a book” mixes Indiana Jones and Bernie Madoff.
Intrigued? You can find out more on Saturday starting at noon at the East Hampton Library, as Mr. Rugg, an East Hamptoner, photographer, founder of a graphics company, and former adjunct professor at L.I.U., reads from and discusses his work.