Those following this weekend’s events in Tripoli will no doubt be interested in Banipal‘s issue dedicated to Libyan fiction. And, as Moammar Gaddafi‘s reign appears to be ending, the Guardian‘s evisceration of his short stories is worth a read. On NPR‘s site, Hisham Matar also explains the influence of Gaddafi’s rule on Libyan writing.
Literary Libya
Wednesday Links
Some very cool Hunter S. Thompson photography showing now at an LA gallery. The show coincides with a pricey new “collector’s edition” book that “presents a rare look into the life of Thompson.” (via)Another most literate cities list has arrived. In 2006, Seattle wins, with Minneapolis second. My hometown Washington, DC, is tied for third and LA, where I lived when I started this blog, is eighth. The last two cities I’ve lived in, Chicago (39th) and, now, Philadelphia (tied for 33rd), fail to crack the top ten. Not sure what conclusions I can draw about that, but USA Today draws its own conclusions in an article about the list.Somebody gets into Gwenda’s garbage, her papers fly everywhere, and before you know it, she’s cought in a “indie movie scene wrought with ironic symbolism.” Brilliant.Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks. Also Brilliant. (via Languagehat)On a more serious note, Tim O’Reilly explains why the book search efforts of Google, et al, are broken. The problem is that we must search in Google’s (or Yahoo’s) walled garden. There is no way to search across all of the books that have been digitized, which is very much at odds with our experience on the Web, where we can search everything at once.
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The Common’s Postcard Auction
Our friends at The Common have organized a Postcard Auction, and you have until May 20 to bid online. Users can bid on the chance to have well-known authors – such as Adam Johnson, Téa Obreht, Chris Ware, and Kiese Laymon – send handwritten postcards to the address of their choosing. Come on, now. This is your chance to get a handwritten note from an Orange Prize-winner.
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Multi-Tasking
“When you want to read a long book, for reasons of weight a paperback must do, and you’ll just have to suck it up re: its inevitably smaller print and wind-catchingly thinner pages.” Here’s a handy guide to reading while you walk from the good people over at The Awl.
“What they are, what they should be”
The 2015 IMPAC Dublin Longlist
This morning, the longlist for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin award came out, and the nominees include some familiar names. Year in Reading alum Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is on there, as is Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane (reviewed here by our own Tess Malone), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (which won this year’s Pulitzer) and The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (whom you can learn more about in this essay by our own Bill Morris).
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“On Stage as On Paper”
There’s just something about David Foster Wallace‘s writing that makes people want to adapt it. We’ve written about this phenomenon before – there have been Infinite Jest-inspired radio tributes and music videos, series of illustrations, even a novel-in-legos. Interest in adapting Wallace’s work doesn’t seem to be slowing, and earlier this month Public Theatre put on an experimental performance of passages of his writing and interviews, A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which both Salon and Hyperallergic reviewed.
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