This year, the good folks at Slate and the Whiting Foundation kicked off a new literary prize, intended to reward authors for great second novels. To wrap up the year, they’ve asked several winners of the prize, including Akhil Sharma, Helen DeWitt and Daniel Alarcon, to write short pieces about objects that symbolize the writing process for their books. (Akhil Sharma chooses a stopwatch, while Eileen Myles chooses a can of Cafe Bustelo.)
Detritus
DFW’s Nonfiction
Leveling the kind of accusation that perhaps only such an esteemed writer can, Jonathan Franzen intimates that David Foster Wallace‘s nonfiction (such as “Shipping Out“) wasn’t exactly honest.
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Digital Nation
Point: “Repeated surveys show that children spend less time reading than did previous generations. They instead devote many hours of their waking lives to electronic screens of one kind or another.” Counterpoint: “Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1989, spent the most money on books in 2011, taking over long-held book-buying leadership from baby boomers…with 43 percent of GenY’s purchases going to online channels, they are adding momentum to the industry shift to digital.” Conclusion?
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The Bard of Florida
After passing through the House, a new bill establishing a four-year term limit for the state’s Poet Laureates is set to reach the Florida governor’s desk in the near future. The Sunshine State has been without a Poet Laureate since Edmund Skellings died in 2012.
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The House of Black Is For Sale
Joining the Order of the Phoenix might cost you. The Movoto Real Estate blog priced 12 Grimmauld Place at $3,685,500 (we’re unsure of the price in galleons, gnuts, and sickles.) In the past, the company has estimated prices for Hogwarts and The Burrow. Evidently, you need as much money as J.K. Rowling to live in the wizarding world.
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Toni Morrison Dies at 88
Novelist of our hearts Toni Morrison died Monday night, her publisher reports, at the age of 88. Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her best-selling, groundbreaking novel "Beloved," and was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.
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Zbigniew Herbert on Leonardo da Vinci
With the publication of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 this week, the New York Review of Books Blog posts his essay on Leonardo da Vinci.