Category: words

The literary magazine has a stellar track record picking writers. Rather than make a yearly list, Granta picks looks over the course of a decade to choose writers it thinks will make an impact.

“Mr. Coates’s fiery work – which made him the National Book Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist [and, arguably, earned him a MacArthur ‘genius award’] – will be adapted into a multimedia performance, with excerpted monologues, video projections, and a score by the jazz musician Jason Moran. Portions of Mr. Coates’s letters to his son would be read aloud, while narratives of his experiences at Howard University and in New York City could be performed by actors.”

Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s A Small Death retells the life of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), considered by some the greatest of Sufis and by others (conservative Muslims) an apostate, and his journeys across the breadth of the Islamic world. The award includes $50,000 for the author and another $50,000 toward the costs of translation into English.

It’s April 23, el dia de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Day), the Catalan counterpart to Valentine’s Day – except that it’s a book and not a box of chocolates that goes along with the bouquet for your true love. Natasha Lomas gives us a look at the celebration, for which €20 million worth of books are sold each year.

“When reading about the feeling of hopefulness in a novel, it can become an almost tangible thing, perhaps made out of the fiber of the pages you’re turning, or housed within the blackness of the ink used to print the words you’re reading. And hope can often be easier to hang on to in literature than in real life, where it might feel ephemeral, intangible, and unsteady. And now, more than ever, hope takes work.”

The 1,200-year-old language isn’t among the many options available on smartphones, virtual assistants, voice-activated devices, and even many computers – and with a small base of speakers (fewer than 350,000), Silicon Valley has little reason to spend money to add Icelandic. The worry: “The less useful Icelandic becomes in people’s daily life, the closer we as a nation get to the threshold of giving up its use.”

In honor of Shakespeare’s 453rd birthday (and, perhaps, 401st death day), the Folger has opened a treasure trove: “a Digital Anthology of Early English Drama, which makes original scripts and visual images from 40 plays available to anyone with Internet access.”

In medieval times, nobles believed a crowned and invested king had “two bodies” – one that was material and earthly, and one that was heavenly and bestowed by god. But “the character Richard II — like Trump — shows us how this agreement to live by a fiction can go wildly wrong. Richard does not realize that he is not really superhuman but that his subjects only grant him their willing suspension of disbelief if he plays the part he has been assigned.”

Poet Jane Hirshfield, who hadn’t done anything political before (“I don’t even give dinner parties,” she said), participated in the Science March on Washington on Earth Day. She said; “Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren’t so necessary. … When poetry is a backwater it means times are O.K. When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is needed.”