Final Radio Free AWP Giveaways

As always, simply e-mail me (only once today) at oronte.churm@insidehighered.com to enter. Today only, be sure to include in your title the secret words, which tell an untruth about Radio Free AWP, unless you're going for that Larger Truth Kind of Truth, like Winston Churchill meant when he said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning f the end. It 'tis, perhaps, the end of the beginning, haw haw, bring me my brandy." The secret words:

This is not the end

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Today’s giveaways:

One signed copy of Bill Peschel’s. Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes," from Penguin Perigee. In 200 stories and anecdotes, Bill dishes the goods about authors such as Shakespeare, Upton Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Edith Wharton, and Norman Mailer. Look for Bill’s podcast today.

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Ninth Letter, one of the best and most graphically innovative literary journals in the country is offering a free year’s subscription’s. Work published in Ninth Letter has been selected for many awards anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, Best Creative Nonfiction, Best New Fantasy, Best New Poets, and New Stories from the Midwest. The journal has also received many national and international awards for graphic design. In 2005 Ninth Letter was named Best New Literary Journal by the Council of Learned Journals, an affiliate of the Modern Language Association. Look for the Ninth Letter podcast today.

Also from our friends at Ninth Letter: a “Ninth Letter” T-shirt. I have one of these shirts, and not only does it feel great and make me look cool, I get questions all the time on what "Ninth Letter" means. There’s a man who lives in town along the route where I walk my two boys home from school. He lies flat on his back on the sidewalk in front of his house conducting business on his cell phone. My children call him “the dead guy.” Just a few months ago he rose to a vertical position to ask me about my shirt. So you can see this shirt will raise the dead.

If you’re at the conference, check out editor Jodee Stanley at a panel Saturday, 10:30-11:45, Ambassador Ballroom, Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby, called “The 1960 National Book Award Revisited: What Makes Fiction Last?” What do we value most highly in fiction, and what gets cast aside by the way we define “ambition”?

And later on Saturday, off-site, 7-10 p.m. “Monster Mags of the Midwest.” Free, at Bread & Brew.

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Press 53 would like to give away a signed copy of One Last Good Time by Michael Kardos, who co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His short stories were cited as Notable Stories in the 2009 and 2010 editions of Best American Short Stories and have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Blackbird, and many other magazines and anthologies. Look for his podcast today.

“One Last Good Time, a wise and beautifully crafted collection of stories set in the fictional town of Breakneck Beach, New Jersey, is one of the sharpest, funniest, and most compassionate debuts you will ever have the good fortune to read. Without a doubt, Michael Kardos is a truly gifted writer and a vibrant new voice in American letters.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

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Open Letter Books will provide one copy of Zone, by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre. The copy:

"Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty. Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever…."

Open Letter will also give away one copy of Jerzy Pilch’s Thousand Peaceful Cities, translated by David Frick. Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages. The copy:

"A comic gem, A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist 'thaw.' The narrator, Jerzyk ('little Jerzy'), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father’s closest friend, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, and would-be Polish insurrectionist. One drunken afternoon, the clergyman and the narrator’s father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state…assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme..."

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And finally, this is awfully cool:

Café Press has a large selection of writer t-shirts with slogans such as, “Oh, this is SO going in my next novel,” as well as personalized gifts for the writer and reader in your life.

One winner will pick a t-shirt (restrictions apply; winner will work out those details with me).

Another winner will take home a writer’s mug.

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I thank you for your reader- and listenership during Radio Free AWP, which now concludes its broadcasting run. Good luck on all raffles!