Post-40 Bloomer Daniel Orozco won Stanford’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing this week. His story collection, Orientation, beat out a murderer’s row of adversaries including Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West: A Country in Stories. Check out excerpts or stories from all three writers here, here, and here, respectively.
Orozco Takes the Saroyan Prize
Smartphone Stories
Despite what we might think, smartphones aren’t destroying good reading habits. Rather, smartphones are enabling access to books in developing countries, according to a new study. They allow readers to find books in remote parts of the world without libraries and at a cheaper price.
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Back for More
Last week, I mentioned Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, which caused a stir in Germany with its tale of a time-hopping Hitler. Now, Daniel Torday reviews the book for the Times, judging it both for its historical research and its merits as a work of fiction. Sample quote: “The German public’s acceptance of the artist they think they’re watching provides a critique of pop culture. But it feels like bringing the Luftwaffe to a knife fight.”
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The Show-and-Tell Tale Heart
“Due to its adult subject matter, it was the first animated film to receive an “X” rating (or “suitable for those aged 16 and over”) in the UK.” Open Culture features a creepily fantastic animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe‘s classic story “The Tell Tale Heart,” noting that the nearly 8-minute short was voted the 24th greatest animation of all time in a survey of animation professionals. And Poe’s macabre creation made our own list, from earlier this year, of literature’s greatest walls.
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“Exeunt all, except the Clown.”
Recommended Reading: Mallory Ortberg wrote an entire short story based on stage directions at The Toast.
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Beyond the Pale
Nowadays, Lord of the Flies is a byword for savagery, a book that illustrates more potently than any other just how low it’s possible for humanity to sink. In The Guardian, Robert McCrum ties the book’s conception to the second World War, arguing that its view of the world was “unimaginable” without Nazi Europe.