Category: words

The Windham-Campbell Prizes, no-strings-attached grants of $165,000, go to English-language writers who don’t know they’re being considered. This year’s winners include British authors Olivia Laing and Sarah Bakewell, American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Lucas Hnath, novelists John Keene (US) and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Uganda/UK), and poets Cathy Park Hong (US) and Lorna Goodison (Jamaica).

More than the deluge of personal detail, the chief problem with biography is that the fundamental precepts are wrong, the principles too rigid. For the idea always seems to be that by gathering and establishing facts, cataloguing testimonies and anecdotes, each life can be made a perfect whole — that the objective biographer will see to it that there has been a plan or pattern, and dignity is conferred. I disagree. Why should a personality hang together?

One problem is that the hatred of literature, found across the political spectrum, now conforms to the dimmest clichés of anti-literature without harboring any of its intensity. As far as I can tell, the usual suspects of today’s anti-literature comprise a short list: evangelical Christians, who occasionally aim to ban books on the basis that they are Godless; Enlightenment-core scientists, like Richard Dawkins, who admonish literature because it can’t access the Real promised and delivered by science; and, occasionally, well-intentioned progressives and leftists who want to correct literature by eliminating certain authors rather than undertaking the more difficult work of challenging their writings—their style, form, or content—through literary criticism.

“More than 300 people have signed a petition to either ban or label and group materials related to homosexual and transgender content in the Orange City Public Library. … The controversy erupted in one of Iowa’s most conservative Republican counties in northwest Iowa after somebody filed a statement of concern to the library about a book on its shelves that featured LGBTQ content.”

Daniel Hahn, who won the International Dublin literary award, decided it was past time to reward translator teams for their work. “Literary translation is a difficult profession to break into. Plenty of people want to do it, but in the insular English-speaking world, there’s regrettably little work to go around, and it’s easier for publishers to entrust their books to already-known translators who are seen as less of a risk. But there are many benefits to widening our pool of working translators, not least because new translators often lead us to meet new writers.”

Also: “Search terms blocked on Sino Weibo, a microblogging site which is China’s equivalent of Twitter, include ‘disagree’, ‘personality cult’, ‘lifelong’, ‘immortality’, ’emigrate’, and ‘shameless’.”

The author, who just won The Story Prize for her Anything Is Possible, says, “The first time I read it, I was on vacation with my in-laws and sitting by the pool one of them said: ‘Liz, that’s so pretentious, can’t you cover that up?’ I almost died. So now I read it furtively in the privacy of my home.”

“John Paul Mulready (40) burst into his neighbour’s flat brandishing a serrated peeling knife after hammering at the door shouting … The injured party, Dermot Byrne, told [police] that there was a brief standoff after he picked up a frying pan to defend himself, but then Mulready tackled him to the ground, stabbed him in the leg and bit him on the face. Mr Byrne, who composes poetry, eventually got rid of the attacker by swinging a large bottle of vodka at him after another neighbour intervened.” (This really should have happened in Florida.)

Libraries aren’t just a place to store books. They also have a more symbolic purpose, as a signifier of civilization. Here are five libraries in places struggling to survive themselves.