Caine Prize for African Writing Finalists
The finalists for this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing (given to a short story from an African writer published in English) were announced earlier this week. Here are the five shortlisted pieces, with links to pdf versions of some of the stories: Mamle Kabu (Ghana) The End of Skill from Dreams, Miracles and ...
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A Romanian Bookstore in Manhattan
Last year, the first foreign-language edition of the Book Review launched in Romania. Now, in another unexpected bit of cultural turnabout, Midtown Manhattan has gotten what must be its only Romanian bookstore. (ed: look for one of Open Letter’s board members in the photo) Well, sort of. From now until July ...
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Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age
Where: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 3222 Angell Hall 9:30-10:00: Coffee and Refreshments 10-12:00: Panel on New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age 2:00-4:00: Forum on New Institutions for the Digital Age At the current moment of ever-accelerating technological change, it’s particularly ...
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Pretend This Post Appeared Yesterday . . .
As pointed out at Moby Lives yesterday marked the 93rd year after the death of Sholem Aleichem. (No, I don’t think 93 has any real numerological significance, but anniversaries are a nice reason for writing about someone’s work/life. And this does happen to be the 150th year after Aleichem’s birth . . . ...
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Latest Review: The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani
The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files. Al-Ghitani has a couple other books available in English translation from the American University of Cairo Press, including Pyramid Texts and The Mahfouz Dialogs. Based on the strength of this particular novel, I have the ...
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I Mean, I *LOVE* Yu Hua's Brothers
From the Library of Congress (via The Elegant Variation): On April 23, 2009, a federal district court in the southern Russian province of Dagestan issued an unprecedented ruling, ordering a journalist of a local newspaper to pay compensation in an amount equal to US$1,000 to a writer who did not like a review of his book ...
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Fail, Fail Again
Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale: [. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and ...
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