Posts filed under 'marquis de sade'

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

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. 

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Weekly News Roundup, 11th April 2014: Sade goes home, Prizes everywhere

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Good news always seems to come in threes—or fours, or fives… News of this week’s literary accolades struck with some seriously heavy hitters. The Dublin IMPAC Award has announced its finalists, which include five books in translation and a novel by Asymptote interviewee Tan Twan Eng. For this prize, especially, the stakes are quite high: the winning author receives a 100,000-Euro prize, or in the case of a translation, a 75,000-25,000-Euro writer-translator split! Karl Ove Knausgaard, contentious memoirist and nominated for the IMPAC, has been graced with double honors this week: he’s also been shortlisted for the International Foreign Fiction Prize, which historically includes two female Japanese writers as well (a first!): Yoko Ogawa and Hiromi Kawakami. It’s a good week for female writers in general: the prize formerly known as the Orange Prize the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist. READ MORE…