This month Oxford American published “Everything Went Wild,” Sarah Viren’s essay on her quest “to figure out what Florida literature is.” In her reporting, Viren reached out to our editor Nick Moran because she’d noticed his ongoing Florida literature project here at The Millions, punctuated most recently by his essay this week on Lauren Groff, Christine Schutt, parenthood, the environment, and whether Florida threatens or is threatening.
What is Florida? What is Florida Literature?
Or, The Whale
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Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both has won the Bailey’s Prize for women’s fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you’re not too familiar with Smith’s work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
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A Curious Win
The Olivier Awards (aka the London Tonys) went down last night, and a certain theatrical adaptation won a record seven awards. The book that inspired that adaptation? The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
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Reading a Video Game
The modern maestros of fantasy at Bethesda Softworks penned thousands of pages of text for the Elder Scrolls series, scattering 256 detail-packed, in-game books across 2006’s Oblivion, with a commensurate amount in 2002’s Morrowind. Presumably these tomes were consumed by the hardcore few. Did Bethesda spend countless hours of careful word-crafting for a fanatical minority?
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Unpredictable Prestige
In 1929 readers ventured that John Galsworthy was the author most likely to be read in 100 years. Why were they so wrong?
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Big Little Lies
“Literature can use secrecy as a device to ensnare readers, to pull the wool over their eyes or to reveal to them things that the characters can’t see. Whether large – businessman by day, serial killer by night; or small – where a character silently yearns for an ex-lover.” Eli Goldstone compiles a list for The Guardian of 10 novels whose characters are concealing big secrets, including a few lesser-knowns like Shirley Jackson‘s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani.