Morrisey, Lauren Groff, and Erica Jong are among the finalists for the 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction award. The award is presented annually by the British magazine Literary Review in an attempt to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them.” Past winners include Norman Mailer and John Updike (the sole recipient of a prestigious lifetime achievement award).
Bulbous Salutation
The Marvelous Words
Over at Catapult, Niina Pollari writes about translating Finnish literature in English. As she puts it, “If a thing you read gives you that sensation, it’s your responsibility to share the piece with someone.”
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“And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly tweet.”
Henry Eliot, playing the Host, led an expedition of 24 pilgrims on a modern-day, multimedia reenactment of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. You can check out their recap complete with pictures, audio, and video over at The Guardian.
Tuesday New Release Day: Diamant; Horowitz; DFW; Davis
New this week: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant; Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz; a limited edition of The David Foster Wallace Reader; and The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis (which I wrote about last week). For more on these and other recent titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
A blog by any other name
The New Yorker announced that their literary blog, The Book Bench, will henceforth be called Page-Turner. The name change signals a “building on the work of the Book Bench blog, and expanding on it.” In an inaugural post, Ryan Bloom translates the deceptively simple first line of The Stranger.
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Hitler at Home
Read about Hitler’s vacation homes and how they shaped his image via propaganda in an excerpt from Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos at The New Republic. We reviewed Ben Urwand’s book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which discusses other propaganda surrounding the Nazi regime.
Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell
A July 2009 interview at bookish us with National Book Award nominee Bonnie Jo Campbell. Interesting especially is the question (and answer) about how/why American Salvage, the only book from a small press among this year’s NBA finalists, ended up with Wayne State University Press (with an initial print run of 1,500).
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