“These elements of scandal, by now familiar in the #MeToo era, claimed an unusual casualty on Friday: The Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s most prestigious accolade for writing.” In the wake of a sex abuse scandal, The Swedish Academy announced it will postpone this year’s award until next year when they will name two winners. In the meantime, maybe we should all mull over the problem with prestigious prizes.
The Nobel Will Return in 2019
Angel Face: Barbie Latza Nadeau on Student Killer Amanda Knox
At The Daily Beast, Newsweek reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau on Amanda Knox, the American university exchange student convicted of the murder of her roommate, an English exchange student, Meredith Kircher, by Italian criminal courts in December 2009. The murder took place in Perugia, Italy, where both girls were studying abroad. The case, with its suggestions of ritual sexual violence, and Knox’s bizarre behavior throughout the investigation and trial transfixed the Italian media. The excerpt at the Beast is from Nadeau’s new book Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox.
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Writer as Painter
“The past fascinates me obsessively, I suppose, because it’s such a strange phenomenon. The past was the present at some point, and it was just as boring as the present. What makes it so important? What gives it that luminous, exalted quality where it becomes the past?” John Banville addresses these and many other heady questions in his new novel, The Blue Guitar.
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Kandy Kakes and Pathologies
Is anyone else hungry, now? Caution: this review of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine from The New Inquiry is a real appetite inducer.
A Sense of Danger
Recommended Listening: Renata Adler’s Longform podcast on writing routines and the need for acquiring a sense of danger.
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The Secret Life of Ayn Rand
Kevin Courier is re-running interviews he did for the CBC in the 1980s on the Critics At Large site. Here’s his 1986 interview with Barbara Brenden, author of The Passion of Ayn Rand. Brenden’s book, Courier writes, “not only unveiled this polarizing figure” of Ayn Rand, but it “also illustrated the perils of blind faith and idolatry.” Given the Objectivist’s influence on a certain vice presidential candidate, this one’s worth a read.
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Let the Wild Rumpus Begin
Dave Eggers shares the skinny on his forthcoming Where the Wild Things Are project – including an excerpt of the novel and the killer trailer for the movie version – with The New Yorker.
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Problems with prestigious prizes. I am really concerned about the way some accusations are presented. Ms. Clemmon’s accusation against Diaz in Australia was presented almost like a stunt. This is not a game. If you have been sexually assaulted or harassed, it is a crime and one must go to police, or get a lawyer, rather than take part in this gleeful kind of anonymous confrontation in the guise of a question for a writer on a panel. Not mature, not credible.
Re women writers paid less than men, take “girl” or “wife” out of the title. These ubiquitious and unintellectual books are generally in trade paperback, so 10 or 20 dollars less in price. I do nothing but roll my eyes in book stores now.
Having said that women writers are great. Lily Tuck, Mary Gordon, Sarah Hall, Sigrid Nunez, for example, deserve every penny they make publishing in hardcover, and the prices in Canada (35-38 dollars) equals that of men writers: Laurence Osborne and Robert Coover for example. I am willing to cough up my hard earned money for quality, but not for “girl/wife” thrillers.
I see no difference in pricing, especially in non fiction, where prices range from 35 dollars and up to 50, for literary biography and history, written by either sex.