Friday Lit Links — Week of May 4
News, Reviews, and Interviews
Our new issue on speculative fiction includes an extensive list of international fiction in the genre. Carmen Maria Machado and Sofia Samatar, two of the recommended authors, have given stellar interviews with Storylogical over the past several months.
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, and the Academy of American Poets is featuring work by many writers to celebrate. Among them are Joseph O. Legaspi, co-editor of our March special section on Philippine-American lit, and Li-Young Lee, whose latest collection was reviewed in the same issue and who was also interviewed in our January issue.
Martín Espada was recently awarded the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors lifetime achievement and carries a $100,000 award. Espada featured in our November 2012 issue on law and lit.
The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States has some exciting news this week. For starters, the French-American Foundation has shortlisted the 31st annual Translation Prize selections. Also, several happenings and exhibits around the country will be commemorating the May ’68 student protests that rocked France fifty years ago this month.
The #MeToo movement continues to expose scandalous behavior as the Swedish Academy comes under fire for its handling of past misdeeds. The affair has put the Nobel Prize in Literature on hold this year.
Rolling Stone takes a look at a new book that chronicles Lou Reed’s literary endeavors.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
If you happen to be in New York next week, Albanian poets Luljeta Lleshanaku and Ani Gjika will be in town for the book launch of their collection Negative Space (one of our Summer Reads 2018 picks in the new issue). On May 11, the pair will be at McNally Jackson in Brooklyn, and on May 12 at Poets House. Lleshanaku authored the collection, with Gjika serving as translator.
Greg Grandin, writing for The Nation, offers up an in-depth essay on Joseph Conrad’s complex relationship with Africa.
May 1 was International Workers’ Day, and Haymarket Books is celebrating all May with 50 percent off all books on its class war reading list. You can even get a free ebook (where available) and free shipping on orders over $25 inside the US.
And finally, Roberto Bolaño’s gargantuan novel 2666 would normally be nowhere near most people’s lists of books suitable for adaptation, so of course someone went and staged the thing. The five-and-a-half-hour play, put on by Chicago’s Goodman Theater, is streaming online, for free, for the next two years.
