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
Bit of Opposition
“A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.” Saul Bellow saw a bit of resurgence this year with the publication of his collected non-fiction, There Is Simply Too Much to Say. Why do we need him now more than ever? According to Michael Weiss at The Daily Beast, it’s because he has “a bit of the opposition in him.” This essay is exhaustive and thoroughly researched and well worth your time.
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Literature in Emojis
Slate has translated famous first lines of literature into emojis, and they’re surprisingly coherent. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark‘s essay on opening sentences.
It’s Tuesday! It’s New Releases
The long, long awaited posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting… has arrived. Also newly out today (in the States) is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms.
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Novelistic Ambitions
David Kurnick explores what makes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels so addictive. As he puts it, “In Ferrante we see what grand novelistic ambition looks like devoid of writerly vanity.” Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.
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Pen Pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the collection Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters: “‘Hasn’t it been awful?’ Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. ‘We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?’”
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“Sleep is strange”
Recommended Reading: In an essay for Poetry, Siobhan Phillips explores an “old connection” – the tie between sleep and poetry – using Lyn Hejinian’s Book of a Thousand Eyes as a compass.
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Two Bards
The second time Eudora Welty met William Faulkner, the latter brought the former out on a ride in his boat. She wrote a letter to Jean Stafford in 1949 that described the experience in entertaining detail. At The Paris Review Daily, you can read the letter in full. Pair with: James McWilliams on Faulkner’s novel The Reivers.
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