The winners of the 2017 Kirkus Prize have been announced: Lesley Nneka Arimah‘s What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky for fiction; Jack E. Davis‘s The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea for non-fiction; and Cherie Dimaline‘s The Marrow Thieves for young reader’s literature. See also: Arimah’s short story collection was on our 2017 Great Book Preview.
And the Kirkus Prize Goes to…
Lerner Interviews Gizzi
Leaving the Atocha Station author Ben Lerner interviews Threshold Songs author Peter Gizzi in what can only be described as a poetry explosion.
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The Greatest Hall Under Heaven Found
Heorot has been found in Lejre, Denmark. Archeologists excavated what could be King Hrothgar’s famous mead hall in Beowulf. No remains of Grendel have been dug up yet.
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Sci-Fi and Colonialism
The Atlantic discusses the link between science fiction and colonialism. “The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think.”
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Friends Forever
Attention Babysitters Club fans: at 5:30 EST tonight, Scholastic will be holding a live Twitter party with author Ann M. Martin. Maybe it’s finally time to find out if Claudia ever finished middle school, yes / yes?
Whither the last typewriter?
Historian Suzanne Fischer on nostalgic artifacts and the changing use for typewriters from work objects to elements of decor.
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“Tongue-in-Cheek Tocqueville”
“‘So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?’ ‘Yes.'” Karl Ove Knausgaard travels North America as “a tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville” for the New York Times Magazine. Pair with his piece for The Millions, “The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder,” and with Jonathan Callahan‘s reading of Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
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The Academic Life
Whether or not you believe that Oxford University Press is “the largest, most diverse and most respected university press in the world,” you’ll appreciate this review of a new history of the company, which goes through OUP’s origins, its relationship with its namesake and the opening of its New York office in 1896.
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