News Release

Hawthorne Books Acquires David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman’s Life is Short—Art is Shorter

For immediate release 01 Aug 2013

Contact: 503-327-8849 rhughes@hawthornebooks.com |

Life is Short – Art is Shorter is a sustained argument for the excitement and urgency of literary brevity in a digital, post-religious age and an analysis and embodiment of how different literary gestures are related to different stages of a person’s life. It’s not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get an anthology; a course’s worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity; and a meditation on the brevity of human existence. Contributors include: Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barry Hannah, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Anne Lamott, George Orwell, George Saunders, Lauren Slater, James Tate, and Paul Theroux.


David Shields is the author of fifteen books, including How Literature Saved My Life, Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Remote.


Elizabeth Cooperman’s work has appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Seattle Review, and 1913: A Journal of Forms. She lives in Seattle, and works for Poetry Northwest and a ninety-year-old blind man.

Hawthorne Books
3636 NE 45th Avenue, Portland, OR 97213
503-481-1632

Hawthorne Books is distributed by PGW (800-788-3213 / www.pgw.com).