Judge and writer Adam Gopnik said that Red Memory is a “haunting” read. “Haunting for the memories, many of them horrible, that it evokes; haunting because so much of that memory has been suppressed or repressed by the Chinese Communist party in the years since; and haunting because of how violent ruptures in social fabric can often seem to heal themselves while leaving a scar behind.” Read more
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Spanish author Luis Mateo Díez has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor, Culture Minister Miquel Iceta said Tuesday. Read more
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Jean-Baptiste Andrea received the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary award, on Tuesday for his novel “Watching Over Her.” The novel, published by L’Iconoclaste, is a sprawling fresco that follows Michelangelo “Mimo” Vitaliani, a dwarf and skilled sculptor who at the end of his life is said to be “watching over” his masterpiece, a mysteriously powerful sculpture. Read more
Darwin had the Beagle, Hemingway the Pilar, and for writer John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts, there was the Western Flyer, hallowed ground for their six-week journey in the spring of 1940 to the Sea of Cortez. Their sojourn was brief, but their observations of marine life and ruminations on human life — portrayed in Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” — have reached across generations, inspiring literary and scientific devotees whose affection for the boat sees value far beyond any modern practicality. Read more
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Vampires! Vampires! Vampires! Read more
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Her writing was admired by Hemingway. Then her books — and body — disappeared. Read more
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As authors across the world explore their darkest fears, horror fiction is evolving to offer a chilling reflection of our times. Read more
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Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain. Watch trailer
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The entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works held by the British Library is being made available in digital format after the completion of a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts. Read more
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The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” he imagines a computer that would be “capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels,” bringing to the page what humans “are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes in our psychological life.” For him, literature is simply “a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality” of the writer. When read today, Calvino’s predictions—“provocative and even profane” at the time, as he admitted—seem eerily prescient. Read more
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