Covering the froth of exiled life in all its forms: travel, booze, fashion, art & more…
The Louvre’s former boss charged in art trafficking case
- by Aurelien Breeden
Looking back at a horrific week
Orwell Prizes finalists
They've announced the finalists for this year's Orwell Prizes, which includes the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, for which nine titles remain in the running (none of which I've seen).
There are also prizes for Political Writing and for Journalism, but of course the best-named of the lot is the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils for which there are, surprisingly, only ten finalists .....
The winners will be announced 14 July.
Publishing in ... Ukraine
At Deutsche Well Anastassia Boutsko reports that a Ukrainian publishing house makes books to survive -- Kharkiv-based Vivat
Ed Nawotka had a Q & A with CEO Yulia Orlova at Publishers Weekly two months ago, Ukraine's Vivat Publishing House Fights to Survive.
Dorothy Project profile
At Publishers Weekly John Maher profiles Dorothy, a (Successful, Experimental) Publishing Project -- the feminist independent press run by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker, Dorothy, a Publishing Project.
Jhumpa Lahiri Q & A
Jhumpa Lahiri Q & A
Jhumpa Lahiri's Translating Myself and Others recently came out, and at npr Mary Louise Kelly has a Q & A with her, Jhumpa Lahiri on how she fell in love with translating and how it shapes her writing.
NSW Premier's Literary Awards
They've announced the winners of this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards; for a more convenient list of all the winners, see the Books + Publishing report.
The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction went to Dark as Last Night by Tony Birch -- see also the University of Queensland Press publicity page -- while Book of the Year (and the Multicultural NSW Award) went to Still Alive by Safdar Ahmed -- see also the Twelve Panels Press publicity page
Expanded book coverage at The Atlantic
At The Atlantic Jane Yong Kim goes about Introducing an Expanded Books Section, promising:
Expect more book reviews and essays -- plus provocative arguments, reported stories, profiles, original fiction and poetry, and, of course, recommendations for your every reading need.
That sounds ... good. But I recall New York magazine (well, New York Media) announcing New York Media to Triple Books Coverage Across Sites Including Vulture and the Cut less than three years ago and that fizzled spectacularly and pretty much immediately, lasting about a week.
Q & A: Daniel Mendelsohn
At The Oxonian Review Foteini Dimirouli has An Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, the fifth in their: "series of interviews with contemporary critics about criticism".
Among his admissions:
I tend to write exactly the way I talk, which is why my punctuation is extremely idiosyncratic.
And not surprising to hear that:
There was an absolute rule at The New York Review of Books that you could never use the word ‘compelling’ to describe a work. I thought this was really great advice because the language that's available to describe the effect of literature or art needs to be purged as much as possible of words that are placeholders, which stop us, as we write, from actually working out the problem. ‘Compelling’ really says nothing.
