Newfound Journal

Newfound is a nonprofit publisher based in Austin, Texas. Our work explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. The journal is published tri-annually online and annually in print and features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual arts, reviews, and more. We also publish poetry chapbooks through our Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. Before submitting, please read our submission guidelines. We look forward to reading and sharing your work. This Tumblr page is an extension of Newfound Journal.

[incidentalcomics]

Stuck in a Book

Happy Summer Reading! Posters are available at my shop. Check out my Patreon page to support Incidental Comics and see pages from my sketchbook.

[bklynlibrary]

Remake The Gate: Who are the most essential American writers of the last 75 years?

If you know Brooklyn, you know the beautiful golden entryway that welcomes you to Central Library. Our distinctive facade features a gate with 15 characters from American literature that were considered canonical at the time the library opened in 1941.

We’re celebrating 75 years of Central Library this year, and while our golden gates are as beautiful as ever, American literature has changed a great deal since they were erected. We’ll always love our gate with its historical flourishes and quirky characters, but we’re curious—who do you think are the most essential American writers in the last 75 years? Who would you put on the gates, if we were building Central Library today?

We’re asking you to vote on 15 new authors, playwrights and poets whose work was created over the last 75 years. The writers that receive the most vote submissions will have their characters represented in an illustrated version of a new gate. Click here to cast your vote, and share your own nominations in the comments!

[newfoundorg]

What are your thoughts?

[thoughts-memories]

[visual-poetry]

by emmett williams (+)

from the anthology of concrete poetry

[mymodernmet]

Unique Bookstore in China Offers Optical Illusion Experience of Endless Halls of Books

[neil-gaiman]

Wow.

[classicpenguin]

Still deciding what to bring on your trip for the long weekend? The New York Times book critics have a bevy of suggestions for you, including some buzzy new novels and some old favorites, like The Master and Margarita and Jane Eyre. For your trendy summer reads, remember that a  Classic never goes out of style.

[newfoundorg]

What’s on your summer reading list?

[bookriot]

100 Must-Read Works of Southern Literature

Sure, you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, and yeah… that Faulkner guy was from Mississippi (let’s face it, Faulkner’s words ain’t easy on the brain). But what else is there?

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place – Harry Crews

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

A Death in the Family – James Agee

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Airships – Barry Hannah

A Land More Kind Than Home – Wiley Cash

A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest Gaines

All Over But the Shoutin’ – Rick Bragg

All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren

Apostles of Light – Ellen Douglas

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams

A Time to Kill – John Grisham

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

Bastard Out of Carolina – Dorothy Allison

Bats Out of Hell – Barry Hannah

Big Bad Love – Larry Brown

Black Boy – Richard Wright

Blues All Around Me – B.B. King

Brother to a Dragonfly – Will Campbell

Burning Bright: Stories – Ron Rash

Before Women Had Wings – Connie May Fowler

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters – Robert Gordon

Child of God – Cormac McCarthy

The Civil War: A Narrative (I-III) – Shelby Foote

Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier

Cold Sassy Tree – Olive Ann Burns

*The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty – Eudora Welty

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor

The Courting of Marcus Dupree – Willie Morris

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man – Fannie Flagg

Deep Blues – Robert Palmer

Deliverance – James Dickey

Delta Wedding – Eudora Welty

Ellen Foster – Kaye Gibbons

The End of California – Steve Yarbrough

Every Day By the Sun – Dean Faulkner Wells

The Fall of the House of Zeus – Curtis Wilkie

Father of the Blues – W. C. Handy

Fire in the Morning – Elizabeth Spencer

Geronimo Rex – Barry Hannah

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues – William Ferris

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

The Great Santini – Pat Conroy

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

Hell at the Breech – Tom Franklin

House of Prayer No. 2 – Mark Richard

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down – William Gay

It Wasn’t All Dancing and Other Stories – Mary Ward Brown

Joe – Larry Brown

The Keepers of the House – Shirley Ann Grau

The Kitchen House – Kathleen Grissom

Known World – Edward P Jones

Lanterns on the Levee – William Alexander Percy

The Last Gentleman – Walker Percy

The Last Girls – Lee Smith

The Last of the Southern Girls – Willie Morris

Light in August – William Faulkner

The Little Friend – Donna Tartt

Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South – Roy Blount Jr.

Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe

The Mind of the South – W.J. Cash

The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Mudbound – Hillary Jordan

The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure – Jack Pendarvis

Native Guard – Natasha Tretheway

North Toward Home – Willie Morris

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All – Allan Gurganus

Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored – Clifton Taulbert

One Foot in Eden – Ron Rash

One Mississippi – Mark Childress

The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty

Other Voices, Other Rooms – Truman Capote

Poachers – Tom Franklin

The Prince of Tides – Pat Conroy

Provinces of Night – William Gay

The Quiet Game – Greg Iles

Raney – Clyde Edgerton

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 – John Barry

Run with the Horseman – Ferrol Sams

Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward

Salvation on Sand Mountain – Dennis Covington

The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

Serena – Ron Rash

The Sharpshooter Blues – Lewis Nordan

Shiloh and Other Stories – Bobbie Ann Mason

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Southern Belly: A Food Lover’s Companion – John T. Edge

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom – Peter Guralnick

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Victory Over Japan – Ellen Gilchrist

Walking Across Egypt – Clyde Edgerton

Welding with Children – Tim Gautreaux

Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor

Work Shirts for Madmen – George Singleton

Zeitoun – Dave Eggers

Did we miss something you love? Holler back.

[newfoundorg]

Agree or disagree?

[prettybooks]

Stories can start revolutions.

The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell (via prettybooks)

[nprfreshair]

‘Fates And Furies’ Offers A Tour-De-Force Plot, Minus Compelling Characters

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan writes:

“For a medium-sized novel that focuses in tightly on two characters and their over-twenty-year-marriage, Fates and Furies vacuum packs so many complex narratives between its covers that you feel like you’re reading one of those plot-heavy Victorian doorstoppers.  And, not only does Lauren Groff tell a multitude of stories, but she does so through a variety of genres.  What starts off as a fairly realistic novel about domestic life digresses into chapters that read like plays and eventually morphs into a dark fairy tale that also borrows heavily from the conventions of the classic psychological suspense story.  Wow. Despite the reservation I have about Fates and Furies (and more on that later), it is a marvel of language and design.”

[newfoundorg]

Favorite books of 2015. What’s yours?

[unreactive]

[powells]

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.” 

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

[poetsandwriters]

Fictional characters are…your creations—so they’ll do whatever you want them to do and be whatever you want them to be. Still, you don’t always know exactly what that is when you first conceive of them. And sometimes they do change. I wouldn’t say they surprise you, but your idea of them certainly changes as you go along.

Mary Gaitskill (The Atlantic, 2015)

[writingbox]

Some great tips on writing setting

[writingbox]

Why I’m not getting any writing done on my so-called novel.

[birdhism]

[writingbox]

The Stages of Writing a Book

[iworkatapubliclibrary]

Happy Halloween from your friendly (spooky!) neighborhood library.