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
Listening to David Foster Wallace
One measure of a writer may be the quality of the thinking he elicits in others. Here, in advance of The Pale King, is an uncommonly perceptive BBC radio documentary about David Foster Wallace.
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Showtime Snags Rights to Clinton-Patterson Collaborative Novel
Former President Bill Clinton and best-selling powerhouse James Patterson‘s upcoming novel, The President is Missing, has been acquired as a Showtime television series, according to Vulture. There are few details about the series because the thriller won’t be released until June 2018. See also: our own Bill Morris on reading Patterson for the first time.
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Love Sonnet
If you haven’t watched it already, you should now. Lin-Manuel Miranda reads a sonnet in honor of his wife and the victims of the Orlando massacre at the Tony Awards. “And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”
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Well-Behaved Women Sometimes Make History
“When the corrective to women’s exclusion from history is to find a few suitable individuals to pluck out of the messy rush of life and achievement, and hold up for admiration, we forget that many of women’s most important historical achievements…have been the product of collaboration, community, and collective action.” For Slate, Joanna Scutts writes about recent spate of historical books about rebellious, misbehaved women, and who is left out of those stories. From our archives: a list of vile women in fiction.
The Crowning
After his death, fans of David Foster Wallace canonized him as a prophet, according him a degree of benevolence shared by almost no one in American letters. In New York Magazine, Christian Lorentzen argues that Wallace himself worried about this happening, and says he’d “probably be the last person to argue for his sainthood.” His essay pairs nicely with Jonathan Russell Clark on The David Foster Wallace Reader.
No Light Before
Recommended Reading: Peter Fulham on William Styron’s Darkness Visible.
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