Even though I’m a couple weeks late on banned books week, I’ve been reading, apropos of nothing, a number of banned books. I just finished Nabokov’s Lolita and am reading Joyce’s Ulysses – both wonderful, wonderful books (although so far my favorite is Lolita – Nabokov is a genius). I also have a longstanding fascination […]
Which may not be far from the mark, figuratively or literally. As noted by Michael Orthofer at The Literary Saloon, Alain Robbe-Grillet just released a new novel, Un Roman Sentimental, but I would vouch that it’s anything but sentimental. In fact, Orthofer calls it “(young teen) porn”, but knowing Robbe-Grillet’s penchant for lasciviousness in his […]
Dumbledore was gay. Who knew? And what terrible timing and awful mechanism to reveal it: after the series, and without a shred of evidence actually inside the books. There’s a battle brewing between Raymond Carver’s widow, who wants to publish the bulkier original texts of her late husband’s short stories, and Knopf, who believes the […]
V.S. Naipaul, in Among the Believers, takes a whistlestop tour through the Middle East, writing about the tension between the dynamic societies of the West, embracing new and revolutionary technology, and the static Islamic societies, holding onto tradition. That basic tension is present in Gina Nahai’s new novel, Caspain Rain, only in sociological form. The […]
So as I predicted, Ian McEwan didn’t win the Man Booker; instead, they choose an author with considerably less fame: Anne Enright won for The Gathering, one of the books considered to be an outside chance. Check out the post-win BBC interview.
The Booker award is announced tomorrow, and all I can say is that it better not be On Chesil Beach. The book does not show Ian McEwan at his best, and the only thing that could catapult him into the winner’s spot is an over-reliance upon his authorial publishing record and reputation, rather than an […]
Doris Lessing just won the Nobel Prize for literature. As the 11th woman to win the prize, she’s also apparently the oldest, and contrary to what people predicted – that the academy would go outside Europe this time – she’s British.
Does the prize season seem to come all at once, or is it me? Since the National Book Award finalists were just announced today, and the Nobel Prize for literature comes tomorrow, I feel swamped under prize mania. Despite that, I still am thrilled by the prospect. Sorry, can’t help myself. Nominees: Mischa Berlinski: Fieldwork […]
So the LA Times has an update on how the talks are progressing for the potential screenwriter’s strike: “The union is demanding greater compensation for writers whose work is distributed through the Internet and other digital platforms. The studios want to overhaul the system to withhold residuals of any kind until after production, development, distribution […]
So below are some of the odds the bookies are placing on the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded Thursday. For my money, I’d go for Les Murray, Margaret Atwood, or Milan Kundera. Apparently Europeans have won it the last nine of ten years, so the judges might want to go outside, and no […]
