Round-Up: Man Booker Prize, Bob Dylan Breaks Nobel Silence, and Stephen King’s New Picture Book
From the Man Booker Prize winner to Stephen King’s new picture book, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines: Paul Beatty won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout following a unanimous decision by the judges. Beatty is the first American to win the prize, which was expanded
This Halloween You Should Be Reading Angela Carter
If you’re looking for some reading to get you in the spirit of Halloween, and your tastes run more to the strange and literary rather than the usual horror fare, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Angela Carter’s short stories.
Seven spooky stories to try before bedtime
What scares you? is a personal question, I’ve always thought. Fear is a universal emotion, a rhetorical choice in arguments that we can all connect to, and we all find connections to the fears that most everyone shares: isolation, the unknown, death. However, it is also extremely individual.
Witches in Literature, or Bodies as Translators of Fear
Lady sorceresses are vessels of fear through their bodies , or representations used to translate terror. A witch’s greatest strength is her body, as when Circe seduces and distract Odysseus from his journey; it is her greatest weakness, too, as when the Wicked Witch of the West is destroyed:
Out In This Desert
When I’ve talked about the desert in various settings over the years—with family and friends, in academic contexts, with strangers outside of the desert—I’ve heard the same remarks time and again about the unviability of the landscape, the loneliness, the emptiness, the desolation. But there is a lot more
In Bookstores Near You: OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN by Anne Valente
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, does not begin with the shattering moment when Caleb Raynor enters Lewis and Clark High School and opens fire—a moment that surely warrants the dimming of the lights, the rising of a curtain. But no, in Valente’s narrative, the
Opulence and Escalators: Xu Xi’s “Famine”
Every once in a while the short story gets its moment in the literary spotlight. It happened in 2008 when Elizabeth Strout’s linked story collection, Olive Kitteridge, won the Pulitzer Prize; and again in 2013 when the Nobel Prize committee recognized Alice Munro’s lifetime achievement in the form.
Cuban Literary Blues: Alejo Carpentier & Severo Sarduy
Apart from their cosmopolitanism, their interest in baroque aesthetics, and their mutual disdain, Carpentier and Sarduy shared a passion that shaped their writing and, through them, the course of Cuban letters: African American music.
The Two Holly Golightlys
Sometimes a movie is adapted from a well-known novel that entirely eclipses the original material. Characters and plot points get rewritten then cast with A-list stars to take on a life of its own completely apart from the book. The result is two similar but separate works that each
Review: PATRICIDE by D. Foy
The protagonist in D. Foy’s second novel is that angry young kid whose pain and shame he cannot express except in strange orthogonal ways, ways that will only deepen his pain and shame, not alleviate them. But Foy allows us inside that boy’s beleaguered brain box and we feel