The shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011 has been announced. This list features Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo, and three other books by Spanish and Norwegian authors.
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011 Shortlist Announced
A Spider of a Writer
Year in Reading alumna Parul Sehgal’s column for The New York Times debuted last week with her reflections on the great Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. As she puts it, "He is a spider of a writer: subtle and sly, patient, with invisible designs. He never proclaims — he never needs to. He envelops." Pair with John Yargo’s Millions essay on Hrabal’s fiction.
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A Writer Who Needed “The Talk”
The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster is now on sale, and among other things, it reveals that its author, who appeared to feel queasy about sex in general, didn’t know exactly how “male and female joined” until he was thirty years old.
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I Have a Mortgage
"Over three decades of almost constant composing and recording, he would amass over sixty LPs, running the gamut from early records with his band the Mothers of Invention that helped to create the milieu we think of as the Sixties, to caustic send-ups of that same counterculture, doo-wop pastiche, tape cut-ups, film scores, gonzo cabaret, big-band charts, way out prog, show tunes, music composed entirely on and for the Synclavier digital sampler, full-score orchestral music, and thousands of scabrous, exploratory guitar solos." On Frank Zappa, music theory wizard and occasional public intellectual.
Pynchon Angst
Sam Anderson hates Thomas Pynchon.
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The Real Deal
“Now, I'm not going to lie. It's annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world's young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule.” Heather Havrilesky on her writing life.
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One Book to Rule Them All
“We note that there is a great lack of schoolbooks among secondary pupils, due to their weak purchasing power. The books currently in circulation will remain in use, but for purposes of ‘complementary consultation.’” Mozambique's Education Minister has announced that with the start of the 2017 academic year, its school system will adopt a single book for each subject taught in the country’s secondary schools.
Also: get to know the internationally renowned Mozambican writer Mia Couto, whose books The Blind Fisherman and The Tuner of Silences were recently translated into English.
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Launching Soon
There’ll soon be a new literary website (and publisher!) in town. C0-created by the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, and featuring Butter writer Mensah Demary as Associate Web Editor, Catapult will publish ebooks and print books, in addition to offering writing classes and publishing shorter pieces on its site. Get your stories and essays ready -- they’re now accepting submissions.
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