Some National Book Award history

Remainders

• Would Shakespeare have eased off the puns to succeed in the new global literary marketplace?

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• The great Jenny Diski, upon learning that students in some writing programs are taught to end their poems with redemption, applies this formula to blogging.

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• Literature Nobel laureate Herta Müller recommends Liu Xiaobo, writer, president of Chinese PEN, and co-founder of Charter 08, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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• In Chekhov, writes James Lasdun, literature seems to face us, "for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness [and] our unfathomable strangeness."

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• Another great essay in the LRB: Tom McCarthy says French writers who've come of age in the past 30 years have had to grapple with the question, what do you do after the nouveau roman?

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• Annals of literary invective: Faulkner once called Twain a "hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."

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• Paul Ford, mastermind of the Harper's website, talks paywalls at The Awl. (The subscription is worth it for the archives alone.)

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• Russian poet Alexander Gorodnitsky went in search of the remnants of the Yiddish language and culture that thrived before WWII in his parents' hometown.

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• Open Letter and Russian Life concurrently published translations of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov's The Golden Calf. Now they're debating whose version better represents the original.

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• Toril Moi argues that the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex fails to convey her voice, style, references, and arguments.

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