Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa has come back to haunt Salman Rushdie once again. Iran is threatening to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair because Rushdie was invited to give the keynote speech. You could also read our essay on how Rushdie passed the time while in hiding.
Iran Boycotts Rushdie… Again
Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
Prufrock in Panels
Recommended Viewing: Julian Peters illustrated T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as a comic.
Why America Needs Indies
Farhad Manjoo thinks corner bookstores are simply comfy and quaint. According to a response by The Christian Science Monitor, he couldn't be more wrong.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bezmozgis; Pratchett; Simpson; McCabe; Oliver; Moran
Out this week: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis; A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction by Terry Pratchett; Ballroom by Alice Simpson; Hello Mr. Bones & Goodbye Mr. Rat by Patrick McCabe; Rooms by Lauren Oliver; and How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran, who released an essay collection two years ago. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Longlisting Other Languages
PEN America has announced the longlist for its 2017 Translation Prize, including Deborah Smith for Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see our review here), Carlos Rojas for Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, and Victoria Cribb for Sjón's Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. (We profiled Sjón's work at length a few years back!) The winner will be announced in February of 2017.
Do You?
Whitney Houston, Adele, Kanye West, Prince, and Justin Bieber all share something in common when it comes to the songs they sing. Each one of them rhymes “do” and “you” more often than any other pair of words. In fact, according to Ben Blatt, that duo is the most commonly rhymed pair in the history of pop music.
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Where are the PEN ******* running to Rushdie’s defense?
I’m guessing we won’t see it.
This obviously being an instance of the subaltern re-asserting Himself at the level of the geo-political….