Lots of excellence on the list of 2011 Whiting Award winners: Teddy Wayne, Daniel Orozco, Ryan Call, and more. If I were you, I’d celebrate the weekend by reading Orozco’s “Orientation.”
Whiting Winners
Tuesday New Release Day: Hanif, Grossman, Barnes
New this week is Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King and Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending are out in paperback.
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“An uncommonly precocious writer.”
Think back to your time as a 14-year-old. What were you doing with your time? Were you beating Norman Mailer in a national essay contest? A Guide for the Perplexed author Dara Horn was.
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Backhanded
Writers have long been attracted to duels, if only because, for the most part, they offer an easy way to ramp up the conflict in a story. At Page-Turner, James Guida takes a look at their enduring relevance, with reference to the history of the duel in Europe. Pair with: our own Nick Moran on duels in Russian literature.
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It’s Not Nothing
We’ve published a fair number of essays about the writing process and its discontents. In Bookforum, Anne Boyer tackles the natural complement to literary work, in an excerpt of her new Garments Against Women. Her subject? The art of not writing.
The Southern Festival of Books
Last weekend The Southern Festival of Books took over Nashville. The latest installment of #LitBeat takes you to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s panel there, on the importance of studying–but not romanticizing–history.
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