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.”
Not sure if folks are familiar with BBC's World Service radio program Witness about important moments in modern history. All of them are 8-10 minutes long, and this one is about the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958, and it is well worth a listen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswsnd
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
My son took a class from Jeffrey Stewart fall quarter at UC Santa Barbara. He said the guy was great - intelligent, lively, really interesting. He was very psyched to see him win.
Sounds like just the guy to write about another guy who was central to the Harlem Renaissance, but who seems to have flown under the radar
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.
‘I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten oClock – you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.'John Keats invents Keats-Shelley #synchronisedreading group - starting Wednesday, 1 April 12pm GMT. pic.twitter.com/DxRefM7V4w— Keats-Shelley House (@Keats_Shelley) March 27, 2020 Darn, I missed the first one. More info here https://keats-shelley.org/news/keats_shelley_synchronised_reading_group
8 April, 12 noon GMT. @Keats_Shelley will read John Keats' first published poem, 'To Solitude' (Examiner, 5 May 1816)Please join us - wherever and whenever you are - for 15 minutes of peaceful #SynchronisedReading - alone and together. https://t.co/5WpyC2uvJB #PerTutti pic.twitter.com/TaJwwEBXs4— Keats-Shelley House (@Keats_Shelley) April 7, 2020 That's 8am EDT for you East Coast elitists.
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
Since I didn't say anything about Catcher in the Rye, I'll assume you're not talking to me. But I will say you're wrong about one thing: Snobs don't like other snobs. They only pretend to while secretly believing the other snobs are getting it wrong.
GPT-3 Generative Pre-trained Transformers or some updated version of these writer bots will one day write a best seller. What's more astonishing is that it will have been written in a few seconds. Creative types no longer need apply. I hope this thought is random enough for anyone who sees it. Ooh La La.
“which historical author would be good on twitter” is a fundamentally flawed prompt for this reason. the notion of lord byron or neruda having a twitter is downright repulsive— thot choc (@shreyabasu003) December 27, 2021 some good replies
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a fucking— Andrew (@roathandrew) January 25, 2022 Many good replies!
So I'm reading a book that mentions Julius Caesar, and that he was "stabbed to death twenty-three times." Is that properly constructed? Seems to me he was stabbed 23 times, but only stabbed to death once. But maybe that's just how the phrase gets used. Or poor writing/editing?
I would have gone with something like "fatally stabbed 23 times." But as noted copy-editor Toby Charles would have said, "that was a baaad one."
So-called “great American novel,” Moby Dick by H. Melville, is mere retelling of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan set aboard imperialist whaling vessel. pic.twitter.com/JPFfFjxIlm— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) March 10, 2022