Tattered Essence

According to Shelf Awareness, Amazon.com will unveil its e-book reader on Monday in New York, according to the AP and CNET Networks. The Kindle, as the device is said to be called, apparently includes a headphone jack for listening to audiobooks and can download publications such as the New York Times.

The 8th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition is accepting entries! They are looking for fiction that’s bold, brilliant … but brief. Send them your best in 1,500 words or less. But don’t be too long about it—the deadline is December 3, 2007.

The Grand-Prize winner will receive $3,000 (that’s $2—or more—per word). For guidelines, prizes and to enter online, click here.

And, the 1st- through 25th-place manuscripts will be printed in the 8th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition Collection, published by Trafford Publishing.

Winners of the National Book Awards were presented last night as the following:

• Fiction: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (FSG)
• Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)
• Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Young people’s literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown)

The National Book Foundation awarded its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Joan Didion, and Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Do you subscribe to the Writer’s Weekly email newsletter with an AOL email address? If so, you will want to check out this email I got today…

Effective immediately, WritersWeekly.com will no longer send our newsletter toany AOL email address (aol.com, netscape.net, netscape.com, cs.com, orcompuserve.com).

If you would like to remain on our list, please reply with a non-AOL emailaddress where we can send the newsletter.

Here is why we are doing this:

For at least two years now we’ve struggled with AOL to get our newsletter through to subscribers who have asked to receive it. AOL, seemingly at random,blocks our newsletters with no explanation.

But what finally tipped the scale was the newsletter getting reported to our ISP this weekend as “spam” by an AOL subscriber. Apparently there are some AOL members who use the “report this as spam” button on their email program as a lazy man’s way of unsubscribing from a list. They don’t seem to realize the chain of events that get set into motion when that button gets pressed, and the headaches that it causes us publishers who are just sending out a newsletter that these people requested in the first place.

So, again, if you want to remain on the list, email me directly with an alternate, non-AOL, email address.

best,
richard and angela
writersweekly.com