“If you read through all the citations, you’ll start to detect certain patterns. Any aspirant Nobel Prize–winner should take note—these may hold the key to victory.” The Paris Review has read through all of the Nobel Prize-winner citations and came to a couple of conclusions, such as “you should be great… but it also helps if you’re epic. Oh, and fresh!” Pair their piece with our own overview of newest laureate Patrick Modiano’s work, and The New Yorker‘s look into the translation of Nobel Prize-winning authors.
How to Win
On Reading and Personality Disorders
“Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like Hell's Belles and Kid Colt and The Legend of the Lost Arroyo and even Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.”
Take It to the Bank
It’s notoriously difficult to figure out how to make a living as a freelance writer. The process forces the writer to learn the finer points of negotiation. At the Ploughshares blog, Steph Auteri writes about the “abstract mathematics” of her freelance career, presenting a list of everything she considers before taking on an assignment. Pair with: our own Nick Ripatrazone on teaching the business of creative writing.
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Sofia Coppola’s Little Mermaid
Sofia Coppola will direct a live adaptation of "The Little Mermaid." No, not the Disney version, but the Hans Christian Andersen one. Expect something darker than singing crabs.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Moore; Solomon; Wheeler; de Waal; Gersen
Out this week: Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers; The Unseen World by Liz Moore; Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon; Bad Faith by Theodore Wheeler; My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal; and Home Field by our own Hannah Gersen (who we interviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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Allen Ginsberg, Beat Historian
"It’s not often one gets the opportunity to take a course on a major literary movement taught by a founding member of that movement," but Allen Ginsberg's lectures on "the literary history of the Beats" are now available online via Open Culture.
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In the Thick of It
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