Category: words

“A novel written in a single sentence” – Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones – “has won the 2016 Goldsmiths prize, becoming the third Irish winner in the four-year history of an award set up to reward fiction that ‘breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form’.”

“Here’s a Kafkaesque approach to the creative process: staying up so late that, as you doze at the writing desk, insights slip out of your unconscious. This was, according to a new paper in Lancet Neurology, precisely what Franz Kafka himself employed.”

“In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.”

“The 36 stories are by Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France Guillaume Apollinaire and other writers associated with the French decadent literary movement. … Each story comes with a twist, from a wolf who is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling the girl’s grandmother and is then arrested for being an anarchist (‘I did 20 years of hard labour, while the slut inherited her grandmother’s savings’) to a Cinderella keen to be humiliated.”

Natalia Sharina, “the director of Moscow’s Library of Ukrainian Literature has gone on trial charged with inciting ethnic hatred against Russians. … Her lawyer says witness statements describe seeing officers planting banned books at the library when they arrived to search the premises in October 2015.”

“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.”

China Miéville: “Was More’s utopia blueprint, or satire, or something else? As if these are exclusive. As if all utopias are not always all of the above, in degrees that vary as much in the context of their reception as of their creation. … But the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary.”

Citing Baldwin’s “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they … have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors,” Scott Korb looks at why “such claims against white Americans didn’t make sense to students who believed they had never believed such things.”

Orlando Edmonds considers James Baldwin’s fundamental question – “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” – in the light of America’s fraught racial climate in 2016.