On Thursday, the fiction writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which marks the first time a Chinese writer has won the prestigious award. Lauded for his command of “hallucinatory realism,” Yan (whose pen name translates to “not talking” in Mandarin) has drawn comparisons to Faulkner for the complexity of his fictional settings. Back in 2005, John Updike published his thoughts on the writer.
Hats Off to the World’s First Chinese Laureate
Monday Linkday
Don't bother looking for that book you need, a robot will do it for you. Will browsing disappear as robots take over libraries?Mad Max Perkins, "currently a senior executive for a major New York publisher," has entered the world of blogs. Who is this masked man?Moleskine, maker of the world's greatest notebooks, has added the Story Board Notebook to its ever expanding line of notebook products. "Advertising creatives, graphic designers, filmmakers, and cartoonists" rejoice!I enjoyed reading an excerpt of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A good pick for anyone with an interest in the subcontinent.
When He Was Good
The 80th birthday of Philip Roth inspires a festschrift of sorts over at New York Magazine, with Sam Lipsyte, Kathryn Schulz, James Franco (natch), and others weighing in on Roth's Best Book and other vexed questions. (For the record, it's Sabbath's Theater.)
Border Borrowing
The Haskell Free Library straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Enter the library in the United States, and browse through the books in Canada.
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Bloomberg’s Daughter
"When a writer is born into a family," wrote poet Czeslaw Milosz, "that family is finished." Well, now Michael Bloomberg can say goodbye to his family. Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of New York City's three-term mayor, has penned The A Circuit a roman a clef about the daughter of blunt-talking Wall Street billionaire who "owns half of New York."
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“As if they didn’t exist.”
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Brian Warfield’s forthcoming novella Bridges No Longer Span These Waters.
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is "the two-person collaboration... the essential creative act"? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he's written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced - C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even "works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet." Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
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So what nationality was Gao Xingjian? Polish?
I’m sorry but this post is embarrassing.