A new laureateship award worth €150,000 was created by Ireland’s Arts Council in conjunction with University College Dublin and New York University. The award will be given to “an outstanding Irish writer of fiction” with hopes that the author will “promote [Irish] literature around the world” and “inspire the public to engage with the best Irish fiction.” The first appointment will be made in 2014.
A New Award for the Promotion of Irish Literature
We Done Good
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Tuesday New Release Day: Abbott, Powell, Stedman, Wagner
Megan Abbott’s Dare Me is out today. Learn more about her in an essay we published a year ago. Also out are You & Me by Padgett Powell, ML Stedman’s debut novel The Light Between the Oceans, and Dead Stars by L.A. great Bruce Wagner.
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The Belletristic Branch
At the Poetry Foundation’s website, a list of twelve poets that captivated American presidents.
Tala Tubaris
Want to be as brilliant as Jonathan Swift? Try reading Latin for ten hours a day. As this New Statesman review of Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World makes clear, the satirist went through a backbreaking classics regimen at Kilkenny College in Ireland. (There’s also the fact that he wrote constant letters to a sickly female confidante.)
Is Korean Literature About to Break Out?
Thanks in part to Dalkey Archive Press’s recently announced Library of Korean Literature, works from Korea are poised to reach a broad and welcoming international audience as never before. Yet the country is still “pin[ing] for its own world-famous writer,” writes Craig Fehrman. Perhaps Kim Seong-kon is just what the doctor ordered.
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And Also With You
We’ve heard a lot about “Cool Pope” Francis in the past few weeks. For a take on the Vatican that’s a bit different from the usual fare, check out this piece from the London Review of Books on the pontiff’s battle against corruption among the cardinals in Rome.
O Pioneer!
Audiobook fans take note: Our Millions original ebook The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes is now available from Audible.com.
“Sing About Me”
“Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts…When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
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