Wilco appeared in a Popeye comic strip, and they also released an animated music video featuring the sailor, Olive Oyl, and Bluto.
Yankee Spinach Foxtrot
Bohane Wins the IMPAC
Kevin Barry has won the lucrative €100,000 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first novel City of Bohane, capably reviewed in these pages over a year ago by Bill Morris (whose drawing of Barry illustrates the piece). You can also relive this year’s massive longlist and quirky shortlist.
Wood and Krasznahorkai in Conversation
The latest installment of Housing Works Bookstore Café’s biweekly podcast features a conversation between James Wood and László Krasznahorkai. (We interviewed him for our site last year, too.) The Hungarian author’s next book, Seiobo There Below, was highlighted in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
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Neither Magical, nor Realism; Discuss…
The New Republic is, to put it mildly, not chuffed about the new Isabel Allende.
Karen Joy Fowler wins 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award
Karen Joy Fowler has won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. A celebratory dinner will be held in her honor on May 10.
Down to/Poetry
A couple weeks ago, we published our review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the follow-up to his debut Leaving the Atocha Station. At the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Adam Plunkett argues that 10:04 inadvertently reveals its author’s poetic training. The book, he says, “dissolves into a poem.”
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Iraqi Speculative Fiction Comes to the US
“It comprises 10 short stories written by Iraqis, all of whom were guided by a simple yet fertile premise: What might Iraq look like a century from now?” The Atlantic review’s Tor’s anthology Iraq + 100 (originally published last year by Comma Press in England), which was released stateside last month—in an attempt to bring visibility to an underrepresented group of writers in America. Read The Millions’ review of the “ambitious short story collection” from March.
War Stories
Matthew Jakubowski writes an experimental review of the first English translation of Mercè Rodoreda’s final novel, War, So Much War. Pair with this excerpt from the novel, which appeared in the new issue of Harper’s.
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Science Fictions and Realities.
What 2012 looks like, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we are going, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we have been, viewed from the perspective of science reality: Mars.
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