The Washington Post reports that Spanish writer and Cervantes Prize winner Juan Goytisolo has died at age 86. Bruna Dantas Lobato wrote about Goytisolo’s 1970 novel of dispossession Count Julian for us, noting that “[j]ust like the nature of exile itself, the narrative offers no relief, no place of rest: just fragment after fragment of dry landscapes, lonely characters, and rooms in disarray.”
Juan Goytisolo: 1931-2017
The Half-Windsor
Recommended Reading: Alex Myers's essay "Just Like..." on Hobart. "I was seventeen, and I wanted to show him – and everyone else (most of all, myself) – that I could be a man on my own terms."
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Happy Ministries
Fans of Arundhati Roy are celebrating at the news that the author will publish a new novel, her first in 20 years, reports Electric Literature; The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness is scheduled for release in 2017. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg maaaaay have poked a bit of fun a few years back at the title of Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, but that was all in good fun.
“David Shields = Canada”
At HTML Giant, Catherine Lacey interviews David Shields, who says that his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, drew material from his stated identity as a “highly self-conscious lab rat.” For more, you can read our own Mark O’Connell’s review of his book in the Times.
“Like church bells rung by wild sugar high children”
"Perhaps it’s a sign that our literary culture is not quite so ailing that Smith managed to make a space for NW, to clear a third path, one that meanders through Willesden, through time, and through the mind." Our own Emily M. Keeler on realism and Zadie Smith.
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Audible Writers
Apropos of my literary YouTube posts, our own Mark O'Connell riffs on the speaking voice of several authors.
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