He argues: "the campaigning novel has become an anachronism" -- in a paragraph that mentions Things Fall Apart and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, neither of which seems particularly 'campaigning' .....
Aside from the fact that there is, in fact, an incredible amount of 'campaigning' fiction being written and published (though admittedly most of it not widely read) -- I get review-pitches for this kind of stuff by the bucket-load --, it seems to me a lot of contemporary fiction is, in significant respects, political. Not always (rubbing-it-)in-your-face obviously so, but still.
The overtly political novel — genre of Orwell, Ayn Rand, Upton Sinclair — is thoroughly out of fashion. Does it deserve to be saved?... Orwell
Apocalypse chic. Being radical used to be hard work. Now all one needs to do is succumb, conspicuously, to hopelessness
Where books matter. Americans usually assume that literature exists to depict life, while Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature
100 books to read on China
From Babel to Orwell, Mao to Borges, Stalin to Imrich, the Cold War had a literary front. As Solzhenitsyn put it, books were “as dangerous as atom bombs”... Atom Bombs
How we turned our apartment block into a community
A book exploring The Bible's complex influence on Australia's political and pop culture landscape, from colonisation to the Bra Boys, is among the major winners of this year's NSW Premier's History Awards.
The winners, each awarded $15,000, were announced at the State Library of NSW on Friday as part of the official launch of NSW History Week.
"These awards celebrate the great achievements of Australian historians who provide compelling insights into our past and allow the stories of our nation to be retold for generations to come," said NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
Meredith Lake's The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History(NewSouth Publishing) claimed the night's top award, the Australian History Prize. Judges praised Lake's work as "ground-breaking" and "a book of remarkable originality".
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'Ground-breaking' winner at NSW Premier's History Awards
“In order to have a second marriage you can believe in,” begins Rick Moody in The Long Accomplishment, “you may have to fail at your first marriage. I failed spectacularly at mine.” In this, his second memoir, Moody comes clean about his resistance to monogamy and an adult life marked by sexual compulsivity, self-destructiveness, and “a long list of regrets.” But something shifts in him around the time he meets visual artist Laurel Nakadate, and when they decide to get married, he is prepared to commit to the vows of marriage with someone he deeply loves.
...Rick Moody: With my prior memoir, The Black Veil, I had a lot of thoughts about the nonfiction novel, the way, e.g., that Mailer tried to structure certain nonfiction works as though they were novels, and about the whole theory of formal hybridizing between and among the genres, between fiction and nonfiction. These were really rewarding ways to think about memoir writing for me, but in the case of The Long Accomplishment I didn’t want to overthink or to labor for an idea of form. I wanted to tell the story, because the story was most of what I was thinking about in 2015 to 2016, when I first really started bearing down on the manuscript. I didn’t want to have a structure that called undue attention to itself. I have done that a lot in the past, preoccupying myself with forms, but I have sort of been repenting of it lately, trying to locate near at hand forms that are more organic. So in this case, beyond the chronological, there weren’t really many ideas about form, though it was a sort of solidifying and emulsifying thought that a solid year was the form chosen by a certain 19th-century transcendentalist for his memoir. In my case, the calendar year was also a valid form because I really was talking about a year, from my wedding day to the dark events of exactly one year later. The form was natural, at hand, and pretty obvious, and that seemed valid enough to me.
Featuring: Professor
Atul Shah of City University in London (author of books on Jainism and
Ethical Finance, about the largest corporate failure ever in British
history the HBOS
collapse and on ‘Reinventing
Accounting and Finance Education’. Also John
Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.
Produced and presented by the Tax
Justice Network’s Naomi Fowler.
"Accounting
was taught in a sort of a technical way, almost in an a-cultural way.
Relationships, culture, and even ethics and values do not really matter. It’s
all about being technically competent and being very good at tax avoidance and
profit maximisation… However…we should not close our eyes to the huge transformation
that is going on in society. There is a new dawn which is happening, you know,
like the 13 year old marching against climate change…resistance is coming from
the old guard, from the traditionals. And business schools, if they don’t
change, if they don’t innovate, they will find their market drops like anything
and then where will they go searching for students and professors? So there is
a tremendous change going on and we need to tune in to that change and to the
demands from young people for an ethical financing.”
~
Professor Atul Shah