From Our Man In Boston:

You can thank academic presses for many things including publishing books not necessarily academic. In this case, I am pleased to point out that Princeton University Press has done the world of literature a good turn, publishing poet, Road Scholar and Exquisite Corpse editor Andrei Codrescru’s Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments.

If you were lucky enough to be one of the 273 people in the audience last week at the Kansas City Public Library you heard Andrei Codrescu speak about his new book Whatever Gets You Through the Night (which just made the Los Angeles Times’s prestigious Summer Reading list!). I just ran across this fun article at the KC Library’s blog which describes Andrei’s book and also lists other popular re-tellings of famous stories. Head over there to see if your favorite makes their list and if not, leave a note in the comments section.

Author and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu discussed his new book Whatever Gets You Through the Night at the Plaza Branch on June 2, 2011.

In recent weeks, we’ve had tremendous good news. Not only has Create Dangerously won OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction, but author Edwidge Danticat was announced as the winner of the Harold Washington Literary Award joining earlier winners like Barbara Ehrenreich (2010), Walter Mosley (2007), Grace Paley (2002), Isabel Allende (1996), and Ralph Ellison (1992). This is an amazing honor and we extend our congratulations to Edwidge!

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams will be at the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site & Interpretive Center on May 7th & 8th. His book, On Whitman (2010), sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around the work and person of Walt Whitman, and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it, to explore why Whitman’s epic “continues to inspire and sometimes daunt” him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction–or reintroduction–to Whitman.

Don’t miss these two exciting Walt Whitman events:

Poetry in Performance featuring C.K. Williams:
Date: Saturday, May 7, 2011
Time: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Walt Whitman Birthday Celebration with C.K. Williams:
Date: Sunday, May 8, 2011
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Both events will be held at the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site & Interpretive Center, 246 Old Walt Whitman Road, West Hills, NY. The series will be hosted by Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer in Residence George Wallace. For more information, please click here.

This interview was taped at The Getty in Los Angeles when Andrei gave a lecture on The Poetry Lesson.

For more “Art Lessons” click over to The Getty’s site to view more interview segments on lessons like “Learning requires a blind path toward a labyrinth of bones” and “Laughter and silence as subversive tools for creativity”.

Prepare for the publication of Whatever Gets You Through the Night in June by reading excerpts from Andrei’s earlier PUP books: The Posthuman Dada Guide and The Poetry Lesson.

I don’t know how I missed this video before today, as this was taped in November. It’s still worth a watch now:

Writing in the Soapbox column of Publishers Weekly this week, Andrei Codrescu makes a new case for the elusive and exclusive author. He argues that Facebook and other social networking sites are ” giving away stupid prose for free!” and that familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed book sales.

He writes, “not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.”

So, what do you think? Is Facebook the marketing mecca we have been promised? Or are publishers and authors actually cannibalizing their sales by providing too much access to what we are selling?

The responses on Twitter are worth perusing for their range of support to disbelief.

We have now published two books with Andrei and have a third on the way. If you are a fan, check out his books The Poetry Lesson and The Posthuman Dada Guide. His next book Whatever Gets You through the Night will publish this June.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Create Dangerously yet, now’s a great time. The American Crawl is reading the book over the next few weeks and you can follow along in sort of a virtual book club.

If you want to get a jump start, try watching this video interview with GritTV:

More GRITtv

We invite you to browse and download our new 2011 Literature catalog at:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/lit11.pdf

Check out the Writers on Writers series featuring C.K. Williams’ On Whitman and Phillip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag. See how they were influenced, fascinated or troubled by these important writers.

And for a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course, you need to check out Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry Lesson. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. You will also enjoy Andrei Codrescu’s forthcoming book, Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. It is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling.

Two essay collections are also a must read. The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by George Levine and The Princeton Reader: Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University edited by John McPhee & Carol Rigolot will make great additions to your reading list and library.

There are so many new titles to check out in the catalog. From The Quotable Thoreau to the 4th volume of The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P’ing Mei: The Climax, you’ll definitely find something you want to read.

If you’re attending #MLA11 in Los Angeles, please stop by booth no. 111 to say hello and browse the books. Hope to see you there.

Also available on the Zocalo site.

If you are near New York City, don’t miss your chance to see Edwidge Danticat TOMORROW at Queen’s College in NYC, in LeFrak Concert Hall. The event will begin at 7pm and is $20 for admission (and free with CUNY student ID!). Danticat will read from her latest work, Create Dangerously, and then will be interviewed by WNYC’s Leonard Lopate.

If you haven’t already, RSVP to the Facebook event, and tell your friends! Hope to see you there!

A goatskin dream notebook. Hypnosis. Cable TV. These are all objects listed as “Tools of Poetry” in The Poetry Lesson, the latest work by celebrated writer and former teacher, Andrei Codrescu. Neither a memoir nor a novel, but a mixture of both, the book takes readers through the first day of a creative writing course taught by a quirky poet and English professor embarking upon his final semester of teaching before retirement. Along the way, he introduces students to The Tools of Poetry, The Ten Muses of Poetry, and assigns them “Ghost-Companion” poets, all the while regaling them with wild stories from his poetic coming of age in the 1960s and 70s.

The book’s cover, with its pleading skeleton, unyielding title, and otherwise Spartan design, at first seems to contradict its funny, irreverent content. After talking to Book Designer Jason Alejandro, however, it becomes clear that the cover only contributes to the sense of irony and whimsy that pervades The Poetry Lesson. The hint of mystique rising from the apparent contradiction between cover and content inspires readers to pick up the book and start reading–as any well-conceived cover design should do!–and motivated us to ask Jason a few questions about the work that went into this book’s cover design. Click to read the Q&A with Book Designer Jason Alejandro about The Poetry Lesson‘s cover.