Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck’s Report has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The book was released in the U.S. as Brodeck and sounds mighty intriguing.
Claudel Wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Tir gan teanga, tir gan anam
If you missed the worldwide celebration of Irish literary greats on St. Patrick’s Day, you can make up for it with these podcasts of classic Irish writers at The Guardian.
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What’s Next? The KGB Bar Run By the Real KGB?
Over at Salon, Joel Whitney explains how The Paris Review worked with the CIA and “served, in part, as a covert international weapon of soft power.” While the possibility is certainly tantalizing, it’s necessary to read Whitney’s article alongside Carolyn Kellogg’s piece in the LA Times, which notes how “the threads of the article … become unsupportably tenuous” as it carries on.
Erdrich’s Love Medicine
In the latest from The Atlantic’s By Heart series, ex-Granta editor John Freeman discusses Louise Erdrich’s interpretation of Faulkner in Love Medicine. Pair with an essay on the pacing of Faulkner’s prose.
This Is Just to Say [VARIABLE VARIABLE]
I’ve noted before how William Carlos Williams’s famous poem, “This Is Just to Say,” has become an internet meme, but I haven’t noted the ongoing and delightfully random “Just to Say” Twitter bot. And also, I haven’t before linked to Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s riff on Williams’s rhythms.
Nicole Dennis-Benn Moves Forward
Nicole Dennis-Benn discusses her latest book, Patsy, a novel that explores issues of motherhood, the working class, sexual identity, and immigration.
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Goodbye to All That
After fourteen years, Bookslut is closing its doors. In a post that went up on March 9th, founder Jessa Crispin announced that the blog she started when she was twenty-three, which made a name for itself as one of the first major book sites on the web, is ceasing publication as of tomorrow, May 6th. She talks with Boris Kachka at Vulture about why it’s closing, what she’s learned about the publishing world, and what it was like when she started: “People who started blogging even a year after us didn’t have the same response because the audience got divided.”
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Book Fixin’
Do you have books in need of binding repair? Do it yourself!