The L.A. Times Book Prize finalists for 2013 have been announced. The five finalists in fiction are: Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (also see her Year in Reading post), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle, and Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version. The winner will be announced on April 11.
The L.A. Times Book Prize in Fiction Finalists
PEN World Voices Festival
I spent last weekend as a correspondent for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. As such, I covered two events for the organization: Friday night’s ninth annual Translation Slam and Sunday afternoon’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture featuring Sonia Sotomayor. (I also submitted a pretty sweet author photograph, if I do say so myself.) For full multimedia coverage of the entire festival, check out the PEN Live Tumblr.
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Happy Birthday, New Directions
Powell’s is celebrating New Directions’ 75th birthday by offering a 30% discount on select titles.
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Will to No Power
Freudians know that Eros and Thanatos are opposites in the human psyche. The former, the love instinct, pushes us to survive, while the latter, the death instinct, pushes us to destruction. In an essay for Bookslut, Jelena Markovic explores the importance of Thanatos in daily life, using as an example a man she knew with an “instinct for nonexistence.”
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Emily Dickinson, Harvard-Bound
Seth Perlow examines how Harvard claims the rights to Emily Dickinson's poems, a body of work that was unpublished when she died, more than 130 years ago.
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Recommended Reading: Jesmyn Ward
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s new memoir, Men We Reaped. “This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.” Pair with: The New York Times profile of Ward.
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Eye-Candy Gift Books
Boldtype offers up a list of “10 Awesome Books to Give to Your Non-Reading Friends,” i.e. eye-candy gift books.
From the Department of Prehistory
This week in palaeontology: “…how did 30-ton animals larger than four-story buildings have sex?”