The Feature Writing prize went to Kathryn Schulz for “The Really Big One,” about the potential for a massive earthquake in California; the magazine’s television critic, Emily Nussaum, took the award for criticism.
Category: words
Literary Pulitzers Go To Books That Had Been Overlooked (Until Now)
For instance, “literary types spent most of the fall arguing about A Little Life in the pages of various literary reviews [while] neither the London Review of Books nor the New York Review of Books has touched” this year’s fiction winner. (They will now.)
How The Author Of Wolf Hall Actually Gets Her Writing Done
“I used to be a late starter, but now I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is.”
How To Become The Best Bookstore In The World
“Our biggest year was when Borders closed. … We got a huge onflow from that!”
The 2016 Finalists For The International Man Booker Prize
“The Nobel prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, Chinese dissident Yan Lianke, Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, Austrian Robert Seethaler and South Korean Han Kang have all been shortlisted for the award, which celebrates the finest global fiction translated into English.”
Marketing Has Become Virtual Word Salad
We all know by now that advertising is no longer “advertising.” It’s “content.” But it’s not just “content.” It’s “organic” content. Or “authentic” content. Or “holistic” content — which is apparently different than “integrated” content. Or “optimized” content. Or “bespoke” content. (You think I’m making that up?) And of course, “viral” content — which everybody wants but nobody gets (unless it’s “catvertising”). There’s also “snackable” content and “ephemeral” content, but ain’t nobody got time to define them.
Trolling Subway Riders With Fake Book Covers
Scott Rogowsky has been getting video of the reactions of New Yorkers to such book titles as Definitely Not Porn | So What Are You Looking At? Mind Your Own Business; Human Taxidermy: A Beginner’s Guide; Slut-Shaming Your Baby; and 1,000 Places to See Before You’re Executed by ISIS.
Africanizing Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’
“Both stories share the premise of a human body undergoing a change so abrupt and so drastic that the old body is unrecognizable in the new one. But there is a key difference. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one non-descript morning and finds he is a human-size bug. But in Blackass, Furo Wariboko wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a white man while his buttocks remain black.”
Department Of Don’t Worry: Books Will Never Be Replaced By Digital Files
“The book industry is too complicated to distill into any one of those sweeping theses. Print books have persisted, but ebooks are not going away. Amazon is powerful, but physical bookstores are still here. The book is not immune to the powerful digital forces that have re-shaped so much of the rest of the world. At the same time, books have been able to resist the forces of change because books really are different.”
Salman Rushdie On Shakespeare And Cervantes
“Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time.”