Random thoughts about Books

No award this year, but two winners will be named in 2019...

2018 Nobel Prize In Literature: Sex Abuse Scandal's Latest Casualty - N.Y. Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/nobel-literature-swedish-academy.html

 

Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic 'New Journalitst' And Novelist, Dies At 88 - N.Y. Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/...onfiction-writer-and-novelist-dies-at-88.html
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism. But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms. His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

 

2019 PULITZER PRIZE winners were announced this week...

Fiction: The Overstory, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)

Drama: Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury (Theatre Communications Group)

History: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster)

Biography or Autobiography: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Oxford University Press)

General Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry: Be With, by Forrest Gander (New Directions)

Music: p r i s m, by Ellen Reid (Beth Morrison Projects)

Special Citation: Aretha Franklin

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2019 - The Pulitzer Prizes

 

Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke Awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature for 2018 and 2019 - BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49976107

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austria's Peter Handke have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Two winners were named - one for 2019 and one for 2018 - because the prize was not awarded last year. The Swedish Academy, which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it in 2018 after a sexual assault scandal. Tokarczuk, who also won the Man Booker International Prize last year, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize, with this year's Nobel going to Handke.

Tokarczuk, 57, considered the leading Polish novelist of her generation, was rewarded "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". A political activist who does not shy away from criticising Poland's right-wing government, she has become the 15th female winner of the Nobel Prize out of 116 literature laureates.

Handke, the 76-year-old Austrian playwright, novelist and poet, was recognised for "an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience", the academy said in a statement. However, he has been a highly controversial figure for his support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war, and for speaking at the 2006 funeral of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was accused of genocide and other war crimes.

 

2020 PULITZER PRIZE winners were announced on May 4...

Fiction: The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Drama: A Strange Loop, by Michael R. Jackson (Yellow Sound Label)

History: Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, by W. Caleb McDaniel (Oxford University Press)

Biography or Autobiography: Sontag: Her Life and Work, by Benjamin Moser (Ecco)

General Nonfiction: The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)

Poetry: The Tradition, by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)

Music: The Central Park Five, by Anthony Davis (Long Beach Opera Company)

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2020 - The Pulitzer Prizes

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/books/pulitzer-prize-books.html - N.Y. Times