Ice Cream Etc.

The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction have been announced! Winners for 2016 are Viet Thanh Nguyen for his novel, The Sympathizer and Sally Mann for Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. You could also read Nguyen’s Year in Reading.

P. G. Wodehouse is enjoying a popular revival thanks in part to W. W. Norton re-releasing some of his books with nice, attention-grabbing covers. Of course the British author has long had his supporters. Among them? George Orwell. Elsewhere, The Guardian compares Wodehouse’s correspondence to Ernest Hemingway‘s.

In the wake of Jonathan Franzen‘s much discussed New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton, Laura Miller defends readers who look to an author’s life to aid their understanding of a given work: ” Byron’s clubfoot, Flannery O’Connor’s lupus, Coleridge’s opium addiction and whatever was wrong with Hemingway do interest many readers because these factors shaped the life experiences from which the great work sprang.”