Last week we mentioned that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s novel Americanah will, all going well, become a movie starring Lupita Nyong’o. We also mentioned that she wrote about her Year in Reading for us last year. But wait, here’s more! The Rumpus has interviewed Adichie about Americanah, and it’s well worth the read.
Americanah Interview
Face/Off
If you (for some reason) want to know more about Vladimir Putin, you could do worse than reading Masha Gessen’s biography. At The Rumpus, Kevin Thomas reviews the book in a novel medium: a cartoon. (You could also read our interview with Gessen.)
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Veering Bogward
At The Rumpus, Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviews Dark Lies the Island, the new short story collection by the Irish writer Kevin Barry. Mitchell quotes a number of the book’s more interesting idioms and perceives “an impolitic decadence to how Barry couples his words.” (Related: we interviewed Barry a few weeks ago.)
Your Okay
Sick of getting corrected for tiny grammatical mistakes? Turns out you may not be a forgetful person after all. According to a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, our brains have a tendency to fall into bad grammatical habits, even when we know the rules we’re trying to follow. In The Washington Post, Andrew Heisel investigates. You could also read Fiona Maazel on the specter of commercial grammar.
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Levine Named Poet Laureate
Philip Levine has succeeded W. S. Merwin as America’s latest poet laureate. Now is as good a time as any to revisit his interview with The Paris Review. You could also watch one of his readings if that’s more up your alley.
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“Don’t tie up this story with too neat a bow”
Recommended Reading: David L. Ulin on The Wisdom of Perversity by Rafael Yglesias.
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2014 IMPAC Award Announced
It’s just been announced that The Sound of Things Falling by Colombian author, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Canadian Anne McLean, is the winner of the 2014 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award (and the €100,000 prize money). We discussed the Prize’s shortlist when it was released back in 2013, and profiled The Sound of Things Falling in our “Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.” Congratulations to Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and be sure to check out his prize-winning novel!
Ferlinghetti on Folksingers
David Meltzer interviewed renowned Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the Poetry Foundation. At 93 years of age, Ferlinghetti still contends that “the real popular poets of America” are not the people writing verse for poetry collections, but rather the folk musicians and folksingers. “A lot of folksingers’ poems are greater than the printed poems!” Ferlinghetti explains. Evidently the American Academy of Arts and Letters agrees: Bob Dylan recently became the first rock musician ever inducted into its ranks.
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