“The $100,000 prize is widely considered the most prestigious in Canadian literature, and caps an auspicious autumn for Ms. Thien; Do Not Say We Have Nothing received the Governor-General’s Literary Award last month, and was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Glut Of TV – So Much Production, In Fact, That Hollywood Is Overwhelmed
“The TV business is facing its biggest explosion of new productions in the medium’s history, sparking a billion-dollar arms race between established TV networks and a deep-pocketed insurgency of online streaming giants. That boom is reshaping the industry from Atlanta to Hollywood, where even washed-up actors are suddenly in high demand and open studio space is the holy grail.”
Why Movie Comedies Are A Dying Genre
Ten years ago, the blockbuster comedy was a key to any studio’s profit margin, given their relative cheapness to produce and propensity to linger in theaters on good word of mouth. Now, as worldwide box office becomes more crucial to the studio’s bottom line, comedies are vanishing from the schedule—because, in the words of one distributor, they don’t “travel well.”
Sotheby’s Reports Big Loss
An expected loss, the auction house says. Sotheby’s on Monday reported a loss of $54.5 million in the third quarter, compared with a $17.9 million loss for the same period a year ago.
What’s It Like Being A Juror For The Giller Prize? Think Fight Club
“The experience was like being in a war,” says novelist Alison Pick, who served on last year’s jury. “Other than the actual act of writing books, I would say it was the most intense experience of my literary career.”
Protests Over Gallery Openings In Los Angeles Escalate – The Anti-Gentrification Side Gets Noisy
“The protests come at a time when the city has gained a reputation as a contemporary art capital that some critics say eclipses New York. Over the past decade, the Los Angeles art scene has grown tremendously, with the opening of the popular Broad museum, large flagship spaces created by local galleries, and outposts set up by a string of prominent New York and European dealers, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s 100,000-square-foot complex, all of which have helped transform downtown.”
Toronto Art Museum Scanned An Ancient Object That Had Been Defying Understanding For 500 Years. They Found Something Interesting
“The discoveries relate to much more than technique. In an ever-more virtual world awash in technology and information, at a time when machines are increasingly more capable than humans, the show raises profound questions about ancient objects that, it turns out, can be made by human hands alone – treasures we can see and contemplate and touch, but never completely understand, exactly as their makers intended. That might be a big idea.”
Claim: The National Book Awards Have Been Corrupted And Demeaned
“When two friends of mine were on recent panels, discord was so intense that each judge picked one finalist, the kind of situation that can produce unpredictable horsetrading and compromise winners. Corruption can also enter in. The year I was a judge, one colleague tried to give the award to a family friend. Another judge supported the writer with whom she shared an agent.”
So You Idealize Victorian England? The Reality Was Rather More… Smelly Than You Might Have Thought
“To the modern sensibility, even the most carefully turned-out Victorian — male or female — reeked. Heavy perfumes covered bodily smells; onion juice was a popular hair tonic; dental hygiene was primitive and certainly not concerned with freshness of breath. Households were poorly ventilated, so various cooking smells clung to fabrics and damp walls.”
On The Eve Of An Election In A Divided Country, The Story Behind A Fanfare For The Common Man
Copland’s Fanfare is an American anthem. “It was written for the heartland, specifically Cincinnati. But it was also for America. In the end, it was not written for a general or a president, but for the “Common Man,” those“doing all the dirty work” in wartime – in Copland’s words. For those who voted and paid taxes. For those who rationed sugar and gasoline. For a nation united against a common foe. For those who waited for their young men and women to come home.”