Matt Jakubowski
The Nobel, the Booker, now the NBA
We’ve learned the winner of the Nobel (Llosa), the Booker (Jacobson) and today at noon novelist Pat Conroy, at the Savannah home of Flannery O’Connor (who dreams these things up?) will announce the finalists for the National Book Award for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and childrens books. Here’s a link to the announcement page and a list [...]
What effect will Llosa’s Nobel have on Marquez feud?
Now that Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel prize, will he and his former friend – and fellow Nobel laureate – Gabriel Garcia Marquez end their looong feud? Here’s a link to one recap of the fight. And it wasn’t just words: Photos of Marquez and his famous shiner are easily available all over online.
New Slovenian fiction
This month, Dalkey Archive Press launched its Slovenian Literature Series by publishing three books: “You Do Understand” by Andrej Blatnik, “The Succubus” by Vlado Zabot, and “Necropolis” by Boris Pahor. As this review in The Cleveland Plain Dealer shows, I enjoyed the first two – the translations are very good - and I’m looking forward to reading the third.
Franzen’s afoot: Guard the Gaddis
I write today to alert the people of Philadelphia, and the people of every other great American city, that if author Jonathan Franzen is scheduled to come and give a reading at or near your city library – watch your Gaddis.
Kleist, Roth, Bolaño & Atta
Catching up on many good things at PRI’s World Books Review (with lots of audio, of course, but plenty of text reviews as well) I enjoyed Christopher M. Ohge’s review of selected prose by Heinrich von Kleist, “The Mad Bad Moralist,” which includes the thought, “Though underappreciated in his lifetime, Kleist’s work became essential to Freud’s formulating [...]
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