In a reprise of this year’s Rooster final, Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna comes out on top this time, besting Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and four other finalists) for the Orange Prize.
Kingsolver Wins the Orange
Kindle’s “Public Notes”
Amazon’s “Public Notes” feature kindle.amazon.com isn’t as new as some are saying, but it might be creepier than you think. In other Kindle news, GalleyCat‘s put together a “how-to” guide to copy and pasting text selections from one device to another.
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Romance Pioneer Vivian Stephens Gets Her Due
Vivian Stephens was an editor at Dell, an imprint of Doubleday, and was instrumental in founding the Romance Writers of America before she was pushed out.
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1963 Was a Nice Year for Criticism
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All Wrong
“After years of reading, teaching, and writing about the book, though, I’ve come to believe that… our understanding of what is comic and what is serious in Huck Finn says more about America in the last century than America in the time Twain wrote the book.” Andrew Levy writes for Salon about childhood, race, and “dedicated amnesia” in Mark Twain‘s controversial classic.
“Would we also just weep and walk away?”
In an effort to get consumers to think more consciously about the “human cost” of commercial sugar production, artist Kara Walker has installed “Subtlety,” a large-scale public sculpture in Brooklyn’s iconic Domino Sugar Factory. Meanwhile, Edwidge Danticat explores contemporary labor conditions in the Dominican Republic’s cane fields.
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The Nobel Isn’t Everything
Wole Soyinka does not approve of the push for Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize for Literature, and he doesn’t appreciate fan letters asking for his support to that end. “How did creative valuation descend to such banality?” Soyinka remarks in an interview with SaharaReporters. “Do these people know what they’re doing – they are inscribing Chinua’s epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations. I find that disgusting.”
Personalized Postcards from Your Favorite Authors
Help support a nonprofit literary magazine and you might win a handwritten letter for yourself or a loved one.
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