Posts filed under 'links'

Weekly News Roundup, 29 January 2015: Great on Paper

January 29, 2016 | in News | by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

What’s up, Asymptote friends? We’re nearing the end of January, which means this is the time for checking in on those good intentions. You might want to consider a well-intentioned check-in at Asymptote blog columnist Anaïs Duplan’s awesome Kickstarter campaign for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa City. Take a look, and support friends (and friends of friends) of Asymptote blog!

Speaking of sponsorships: Scotland has inaugurated its first translation fund, which mean that English-speaking readers can expect some literature from Macedonia, Albania, Norway, and Spain (among others). And our friends at Words Without Borders have opened up nominations for the 2016 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature (past winners include Carol Brown Janeway and Sara Bershtel).

Weekly News Roundup, 10th October 2014: The Nobel Prize, Pick-and-Choose Grammar

October 10, 2014 | in News | by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

First things first: here at the Roundup, we’ve been speculating about the Nobel Prize in literature for weeks—at one point or another, we had pitted Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami and Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as the two heaviest hitters—but the 2014 Nobel Prize is an upset (isn’t it always?), going to French writer Patrick Modiano. The committee cited Modiano’s “art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

Not even in the discussion this year was American standby Philip Roth, who seems to have resigned himself to perennial snubbing: “I wonder if I had called ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ ‘The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,’ I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.” Hah. This sort of snub comes as no surprise, as a famous Nobel judge claims that Western literature is being laid to waste by the big business of creative writing courses and the general tendency toward “professionalization” in literature.