Next by James Hynes has been named the winner of The Believer Book Award, and it was announced Friday that Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver took home the Best Translated Book Award. The book was competing with a shortlist of ten novels in translation.
Weekend Prizewinners
May: The Tastiest and Most Literary Month of All
May is National Short Story Month (and also National Barbecue Month) and to celebrate, Graywolf Press is selling all of their short story collections for 20% off.
Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include Keith Richard’s rock memoir Life, reviewed for The Millions by Jim Santel, Michael Caine’s The Elephant to Hollywood, an “unabashedly old-school celebrity memoir” according to its New York Times review, and Stephen Sondheim’s songwriting book Finishing the Hat.
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DWF – Dating While Feminist
Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s new book Outdated: How Dating is Ruining Your Love Life starts a public conversation about the pitfalls of Dating While Feminist (DWF).
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Unavoidable Anachronism
What can we learn from anachronisms? That mistakes are “ultimately unavoidable – the best you can hope for is to keep them to a minimum and noticeable only by a tiny coterie of demanding experts” – and that if those mistakes are big enough, they can eventually turn into “enduring ideological constructs.”
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A Journal for the People
Recommended Reading: Zinzi Clemmons, one of the founders of Apogee Journal, on the importance of editors of color and inclusive literary journals.
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A Caricature of ‘Not a Good Person’
“Because what [narcissists] have inside is empty space, they have had to make a study of the selves of others in order to invent something that looks and sounds like one. Narcissists are imitators par excellence. And they do not copy the small, boring parts of selves. They take what they think are the biggest, most impressive parts of other selves, and devise a hologram of self that seems superpowered. Let’s call it ‘selfiness,’ this simulacrum of a superpowered self.” Go enjoy this excerpt from Kristin Dombek’s new book The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism.
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