In the fall, we are publishing a massive work, edited by Greil Marcus (Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train) and Werner Sollors (Neither Black nor White yet Both), that represents the culmination of decades of effort. A New Literary History of America is 219 entries, 1,000-plus pages on how America has been made through literature, and how American history and American literature have made, unmade and re-made each other over the centuries since 1507, the first time the name "America" appeared on a map. The theme is poesis, writ large -- appropriate because in our view there is no country more "made-up" than America. Contributors you will recognize include Gerald Early, Sean Wilentz, Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Lethem, Ishmael Reed, Camille Paglia, Luc Sante, Bharati Mukherjee, Paul Muldoon, Walter Mosely, Sarah Vowell, Michael Kazin, Cass Sunstein, Gish Jen, Mary Gaitskill, and Kara Walker. Each has sought to identify, as Marcus and Sollors put it, "points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." This is always happening in America, and the New Literary History is both a reflection of and a contribution to that ongoing process.
As a way to celebrate the publication of this gloriously unwieldy tome, we are running a little contest for bookstores who want to create a display that somehow features, reflects, or interprets the book, its contributors, its subjects, its themes. Anything goes -- get as weird as you want to -- and we will choose a winner on the highly subjective basis of perceived creativity and overall panache. The prize is $500 plus a framed, limited-edition color silkscreen of Chuck Sperry’s cover for the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, signed by the artist. Two honorable mentions will also receive a copy of the poster.
To enter, just send two digital photos and a one-paragraph précis outlining the conceptual underpinnings of your masterpiece to contest_hup [at] calists.harvard.edu. We'll post all submissions here on the blog as they come in. The deadline to submit is November 15; after that we'll hunker down in an undisclosed location to evaluate all entries and will emerge to announce the winner on December 1.
||| A New Literary History of America, out this September.
