Friday Lit Links — Week of April 13
News, Reviews, and Interviews
A rare document from the life of Marcel Proust has been uncovered and will make its public debut at the Paris International Rare Book and Fine Art Fair, April 13–15. Fittingly, it is a questionnaire the verbose author filled out when he was all of fifteen.
To our readers in the NYC area, the City College of New York will be hosting the launch of Review 95 on Monday, April 16. The new publication commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
April 19–22 brings the Tulsa LitFest, where, in addition to several speakers and workshops, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish will be giving a talk in conjunction with Poetic Justice. Calhoun Mish is Oklahoma’s State Poet Laureate and was guest editor for our May 2017 issue on New Native Writing.
From amongst 3,000 applicants, 173 Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s ninety-fourth competition. Among the winners are WLT contributor Dunya Mikhail and Neustadt Prize finalist and juror Ilya Kaminsky.
The longlists for the 2018 Best Translated Book Awards have been announced. Among the nominees are a few familiar contributors to WLT, such as Isabel Fargo Cole, George Henson, and Charlotte Mandell.
One couple has started a unique Kickstarter campaign. They’re aiming to take a two-month, two-thousand-mile book tour. Their proposed trip, which would be taken by bike and go from the Boundary Waters region of Minnesota to Washington, DC, is meant to highlight the environmental threat posed to that wilderness region by copper mining.
BuzzFeed has this excerpt, about writer Joan Didion, from Michelle Dean’s new book, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.
Fantasy and spec lit author China Miéville gave an interview to Boston Review in which he dove into the underlying political context of his work.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
Electric Lit compiled a list of the top new voices of South Asian YA lit.
Ben Ratliff wrote a piece for Virginia Quarterly Review about the term “virtuosity” when it comes to music. Playlists abound!
McSweeney’s runs down the postpolitical (or is it?) life of Paul Ryan.
And finally, can you guess which Kurt Vonnegut–inspired tattoo is the most popular?
