“[T]aken as a whole, the shortlist from which this year’s judges choose their winner tomorrow night is just more evidence of the continued neo-colonial cultural dominance of the UK and the US – the institutions, the power, the money, the contacts.” How to win the Man Booker? According to the numbers, move to London or New York. In case you feel like placing bets anyway, here’s this year’s shortlist.
Place Yer Man Booker Bets
Lit Mags, Ahoy!
Three cheers for literary magazines, eh? Do yourself a favor and check out Tin House’s new Portland/Brooklyn issue (with mixtape to match!), DIAGRAM 12.4, Hobart’s revamped website (with daily content!), and the brand new Revolver magazine out in the Twin Cities.
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“I hate literature”
Recommended reading: The Guardian reports on Varlam Shalamov, a Russian author who spent 17 years in the harsh camps of the Kolyma gulag, wrote more than 140 short stories, and still claimed ““I hate literature. I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories. That is, I try to write not a short story but something that would not be literature.”
Race, Decolonial Love, and Junot Díaz
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The Written World
The Written World is a five part radio series put together by Melyvn Bragg as part of the In Our Time BBC radio project. The programs look at the history of written word, and how it has shaped our intellectual history.
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Infinite Summer: Reading D.F.W. in Concert
The Infinite Summer online book club, brain child of Matthew Baldwin, has finally completed Infinite Jest. To celebrate, they are reading Dracula. Steven Lowman briefly interviews Baldwin at the Washington Post blog Short Stack.
Quantum Invisibility Cloaks: For When Ordinary Invisibility Cloaks Won’t Cut It
This might come in handy if you’re trying to escape a bad review, or even avoid hanging out with your family. A team of physicists has developed a theory for “how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.” Take that, Harry Potter.
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A Light Roast, Please
File this one under “Things I Didn’t Know I Needed” — actor Paul Giamatti playing Honoré de Balzac hopped up on fifty coffees.