Category: people

“The 7,200-euro ($10,240 Cdn) prize named for the German [sic] writer, who spent most of his life in Prague, has been presented for the past 10 years by the Franz Kafka Society and the City of Prague.”

By placing a 100-year embargo on his complete, unexpurgated autobiography, Twain managed to turn each little leak of material over the decades, and each incomplete version of his memoirs, into a Major Event.

What does it take to kill a Hollywood career? The criteria are forever shifting.

“Before he became a nurse in Civil War hospitals, before he sat at the bedside of tens of thousands of wounded or sick soldiers as they passed over, he haunted hospitals and assisted at operations … From his researches at New York hospitals came at least one useful answer: Death is not the struggle before the end, the pain and the terror, but rather the deliverance.”

“She’s an award-winning poet and novelist, and a Canadian icon. Now, Margaret Atwood is receiving accolades for her online cartooning skills as well. An avid Twitter user, Atwood surprised two fellow tweeters by offering to design superhero comic costumes for them, befitting their Twitter identities.”

“Debate aside, there’s no doubt that Mr. Janis has smashed the conventional wisdom that you need healthy hands to be a virtuoso pianist.”

At a seminar in Delhi last week, the Booker Prize-winning novelist harshly criticized India and called for “azaadi” (lit., “freedom”) for Kashmir, which, she said, “has never been an integral part of India.” The Delhi police, prodded by outraged Hindu nationalists, are investigating Roy for sedition, though the central government is said to be reluctant to prosecute.

“In his blue eyes and chipmunk cheeks, in the flamboyant theatricality of his gestures, there is still the ghost of the pretty cherub this Methuselah once was.” But he can still talk up a storm: sniping at people and cities, dissing his mentors, namedropping Maria Callas and Berlusconi. And he’s still working: “It is the only thing I have. I don’t have love.”

Stein, who won a Tony Award for his work on ‘Fiddler,’ also supplied the book, or story, for nearly a dozen other musicals, including ‘Zorba,’ ”Mr. Wonderful’ and ‘Plain and Fancy.’ He also wrote for radio and for television during its early golden age, working for such performers as Henry Morgan, Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers.

“While [he] is a rising literary star in New York, he is a nobody in Russia, selling fewer translations of his books here than in Belgium. … Russia does not like to celebrate the achievements of its wayward sons, often eyeing them with suspicion and even envy. Mr. Shteyngart said that some of the reviews of his work by Russian critics could be summarized as ‘Balding traitor betrays homeland’.”