If I were God and I existed, I would execute an act of administrative intervention on São Paulo. I would raze the whole city to the ground throughout the next decade: it stays just the way it is. Nothing else will be knocked down, nothing more will be built. Try to work on the city as it exists: monstrous, imbalanced, poorly planned and poorly maintained. If it’s a matter of moving money, invest in public spaces: in roads, squares, gardens, sidewalks, lighting, leisure centers, flood prevention—anything and everything that makes of what would otherwise be nothing but a heap of housing, something alike to that impressive human invention we call a city. Investing in urbanity also gives financial return. READ MORE…
Place: Brazil
Weekly news round-up, 20th October 2013: Nobel Prize and awards-season special
The first of our weekly columns on literary news from around the world.
The big news of the week (naturally) was the launch of Asymptote‘s new Fall 2013 issue, and, alongside it, that of a new blog, which we very much hope you’re enjoying. For those of the Asymptote team who’ve worked on the quarterly journal, one of the more exciting things about the blog is the new-found ability to comment on events almost straight away. You’re reading the first of our weekly news round-ups, and the idea is to bring together (and perhaps even hold forth on) the most interesting literary news of the past week.
Stockholm. The problem with launching just over a week after the major literary news of the year – the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature – is that we feel compelled to report on it, even though, given the internet’s voracious 24-hour-news appetite, it’s really all a bit old-hat by now. Oh well. We hope your own appetites will stretch to a more international view on proceedings than you might have seen elsewhere. READ MORE…