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…
Remember to Tip Your Archivists
Thanks to the work of archivists at The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, two scholars have unearthed a 1901 play by Edith Wharton called “The Shadow of a Doubt,” reports The Guardian. “After all this time, nobody thought there were long, full scale, completed, original, professional works by Wharton still out there that we didn’t know about. But evidently there are. In 2017, Edith Wharton continues to surprise.” Pair with this reflection on the role of New York City in Wharton’s novels.
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Twenty Years in the Wilderness
“I think that every novelist of the kind of novels that I write has in them maybe one really good book, but the trouble with so many novelists is that they keep on writing novels even when they run out of ideas.” Forrest Gump author Winston Groom on why it’s taken him 20 years to write his new novel. Pair with our recent three-way interview with writers Emily Barton, Alexander Chee, and Whitney Terrell, all of whom needed a decade for their most recent books.
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Cynthia Nixon to Play Emily Dickinson
Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon has been tapped to play Emily Dickinson in a new biopic from Terence Davies. In a lucky break for that film’s stylists and wardrobe people, the number of extant photographs of Dickinson has recently doubled.
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Annals of fashion history
On Fred Perry and Lacoste tennis shirts: “Two shirts named after athletes who excelled in a sport that is generally played and enjoyed by people with the leisure and money for expensive lessons and court time.”
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