Category: words

“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.”

“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.”

Accademia has grappled with the literary stylings of Bob Dylan for some time. It may be that Dylan hits a funny sweet spot in academia today: To many professors, he still stands for literary ambition and ’60s rebellion. And for many students — born in the last years of the 20th century — he is so distant from the streets where they live he might as well be John Keats.

Shops that sold the political books banned in mainland China have closed; publishers that put the books out have gone out of business; and printers refuse to print the books for the writers and publishers who are left.

So this experiment goes well: “I apologize a lot. I try to assure the international book community that not all of America has lost its goddamn mind.”

The translation was a well-funded, politically motivated effort to show that Muslims were just as smart as, and in many cases smarter and more philosophically advanced than, Greek-speaking Christians.

“World literature’s most outspoken critics, such as Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, and Aamir Mufti, have warned that any attempt to take on such an immense array of cultures and texts will always flatten and homogenize them, smoothing a rich array of particularities into a Eurocentric monoculture. This is a fair concern. But lately the strongest work in the field of world literature has done the opposite.”

Slimani won for her thriller “Chanson Deuce.” She “left Morocco for France at 17 and enrolled at Sciences Po in Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious universities, made her entrance onto the literary scene in 2014 with the critically acclaimed novel “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” (“In the Ogre’s Garden”), a look at the life of a sex-addicted woman in some of the most chic neighborhoods of Paris.”

Actually, there will be several Words of the Year: Collins Dictionaries is just the first to announce; we’ve yet to hear from Oxford and Merriam-Webster. We wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they all choose this word.

“The prize, awarded by the literary publication Kirkus Reviews, doles out $50,000 apiece along with the honors in each category. Judges plucked the three winning books from the pool of more than 1,100 books that received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews in roughly the past 12 months.”