Category: Literature
Fascinating, infuriating, enduring: Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel prize
Many have questioned the accolade, but there is no question that he is a singular talent even if he’s not really a poet. As you will no doubt have noticed, Bob Dylan is the recipient of the 2016 Nobel prize for literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. It […]
Why the prissy reaction to Ferrante being unmasked? | Catherine Bennett
The latest literary outcry might suggest that readers are rarely interested in the novelist. History disagrees. The first time that someone urged me to read Elena Ferrante, he mentioned her anonymity, along with her evocation of Naples, and her peerless representation of womens friendships, as among her most impressive qualities. This was in 2013, shortly […]
It Can’t Happen Here: a demagogue rises, but the parallels aren’t yuge
A Sinclair Lewis novel about the rise of a dictator has been adapted for the stage, seeking to cast new light on the age of Trump but it’s more agitprop than satire. In those entertaining early days of the Republican primaries, the illogical popularity of Donald Trump seemed like a lark. Snarky nicknames were coined, […]
What the cleaner saw: dirty secrets of the upper crust
The Long Read: When I took a job cleaning expensive Manhattan apartments, I had no idea what I would find out about my clients. I heard about the cleaning company from a friend’s boyfriend, a musician who had supported himself by cleaning houses for years. I was living in an apartment in Brooklyn, sharing a […]
Ig Nobel prizes: trousers for rats and the truthfulness of liars
Nobel winning scientists gather for 26th straight year to award the most absurd, strange and curious research of the year Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the […]