Category: words

John Sutherland is a detective of literature. He examines, “with forensic precision, neglected details and apparent anomalies in classic novels and plays,” wondering – was Heathcliff a murderer? Or, posing a full evidentiary hearing about whether or not Shakespeare’s Henry V, was a war criminal? His books have become best sellers. – The Age (Melbourne)

• The Chinese government says that awarding this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature to Gao Xingjian is a political act. “[This] shows again the Nobel Literature Prize has been used for ulterior political motives, and it is not worth commenting on”. Gao’s works are banned in China. – BBC

Gao is considered the leading contemporary Chinese dramatist. His plays, which combine Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, have been performed all over the world, from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Australia to the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. – China Times (Taiwan)

• A TRUE EXILE WRITER: Those familiar with Gao’s work say he rankles the pro-democracy movement as well as China’s communist government. – Washington Post
  
  
• WHO, AGAIN? “Xingjian is apparently the creator of Chinese oral theatre as well the author of a classic novel, ‘Soul Mountain’. I have never heard of him and neither – shameful to relate – had anyone else whose opinion I canvassed in the half-hour or so following the announcement, but then neither had many westerners heard of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz before his triumph in 1988 or Polish poet Wislawa Symborska in 1996.” – The Guardian

Gao Xingjian, an exiled dissident author whose works are banned in his native China, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday – the first Chinese to win the award in its 100-year history. – Ottawa Citizen (AP)

The 20 nominees. – Washington Post

Editor David Remnick says the magazine is becoming more focused on New York, that it doesn’t yet make money but will someday, and that the New Yorker will soon be available on the web. – Inside.com

“American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations… Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us? The big publishers, who comprise some eighty percent of all publishing volume, are largely owned by media conglomerates who are accustomed to earning profitability ratios of their other media holdings. Book publishing often disappoints those expectations and has to turn to a kind of publishing that will ‘please their parents’.” – Feed

Sontag and Oates the early favorites for the Lit prize? – Inside.com

South African novelist Christopher Hope holds the rare distinction of having had his work banned by both his government’s old and new regimes. Wasn’t apartheid’s pervasive censorship supposed to end with the transition to democracy? “It goes on – this urge to shut people up. Anyone visiting South Africa and looking at the papers or the TV will catch, before long, a whiff of paranoia in the air.” – The Guardian

• When Seymour Durst died five years ago, his book collection about New York City had outgrown his five-story townhouse. Last month, his vast collection was donated by his family to the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, “to honor [his] wish to keep his 10,000 books, 20,000 postcards, 3,000 photographs and stacks of other New Yorkiana together under one roof.” – New York Times