“I wanted to walk that line between edginess and timelessness.”
—Designer Angie Hranowsky
Winning probabilities of horses with fast-sounding names are overstated.
Did Paying a Ransom for a Stolen Magritte Painting Inadvertently Fund Terrorism? Vanity Fair
THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF PHILIP AGEE, THE CIA’S FIRST DEFECTOR AND MOST COMMITTED DISSIDENT Crime Reads
A world of goods Times Literary Supplement
The Power Of Fiction Helped Millions Of Us Get Through Lockdowns
Author Valeria Luiselli just won the Dublin literary award. She says that she, her daughter, and her niece have been reading out loud to each other since the pandemic began. “I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’s human experiences – we would not have made it through these months. If our spirits have found renewal, if we have found strength to carry on, if we have maintained a sense of enthusiasm for life, it is thanks to the worlds that books have given us.” – The Guardian (UK)
Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist
They've announced the twelve-title strong longlist for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award, a leading Australian novel prize; it includes titles by Aravind Adiga and Gail Jones.
The shortlist will be announced 16 June, and the winner on 15 July.
Widely noted already, but certainly a fun story: in The Observer Dalya Alberge reports that John Steinbeck's estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel -- Murder at Full Moon, which he hoped to publish under the pseudonym 'Peter Pym' but was rejected for publication in 1930.
The manuscript's existence hasn't exactly been unknown -- it's mentioned in numerous works on Steinbeck, and listed in the John Steinbeck Collection inventory at the Harry Ransom Center ("Murder at Full Moon (published under pseudonym Peter Pym), bound typescript, 233pp") -- but doesn't seem to have been much read, even by scholars; it would be great to see this finally in print.
A Professor Gavin Jones is quoted in the article, suggesting:
It’s certainly not Steinbeck the realist, but it is Steinbeck the naturalist, interested in human nature. It’s a horror potboiler, which is why I think readers would find it more interesting than a more typical Steinbeck. It’s a whole new Steinbeck -- one that predicts Californian noir detective fiction. It is an unsettling story whose atmosphere is one of fog-bound, malicious, malignant secrecy.He might be over-selling it but, hey, I want to see this.
Orwell Prizes shortlists
They've announced the shortlists for this years Orwell Prizes, including for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
The winners will be announced on 25 June.
Franz Kafka at the National Library of Israel
The National Library of Israel has now made much of their extensive collection of Franz Kafka-material -- including manuscripts, letters, and drawings -- available online. Well worth checking out.
See also Ruth Fraňková's report at Radio Prague International, Franz Kafka's never-before-seen manuscripts and drawings go online.
And for the story behind how some of this stuff wound up at the NLI, see Benjamin Balint's Kafka's Last Trial.
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Stephen Budiansky's Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel.
I frequently find that non-fiction titles published by commercial presses such as Penguin in the UK come out in US editions only from a university press; this is the rare title that (just) came out in the US from a commercial (well, large independent) publisher -- W.W.Norton -- and from a university press (Oxford University Press) in the UK.
My favorite titbit: in 1962, at age 56, Gödel comes across a new-to-him author:
