"Poems meet the raw needs of our most vulnerable inner selves in a disarmingly primal way, using a simple tool no other sort of language mobilises in quite the same manner: predictable, physical, rhythmical repetition. Poetry chants and incants; it excites and lulls." - Psyche
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr of Senegal has won the Prix Goncourt for La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), which the magazine L'Express called "the revelation of the literary year … shining proof of the vitality and universality of the French language." - The Guardian
Booker judges pronounced Damon Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century.” - The New York Times
The Daily Star was founded in Beirut in 1952 and relaunched in 1996, after Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. Having struggled financially for years, it published its last print edition in February 2020 and is ending online operations amid Lebanon's worst economic crisis since independence. - AP
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, “If the world’s largest book publisher is permitted to acquire one of its biggest rivals, it will have unprecedented control over this important industry. - Deadline
Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, published 100 years ago, set 1,000 years in the future in a technologically controlled superstate, was the first novel ever banned in the Soviet Union. - The New York Times
So says Oxford Languages, publisher of The Oxford English Dictionary. "'All these other vaccine words increased, but nothing like vax,' said Fiona McPherson, a senior editor for new words. ... 'It’s a short, punchy, attention-grabbing word.'" - The New York Times
Not to mention our own. "In horror, there is no ultimate triumph at the end. Even if the characters survive or defeat the monster, there’s no going back to the people they once were. That’s what grief feels like." - LitHub
One expert on challenged books: "Beloved is an extremely violent book, it’s absolutely true. But that is the point of the book. This mother ? She’s absolutely right—it’s extremely difficult to read. It gets stuck in your head." - Slate
No Modernism Without Lesbians is the title of Diana Souhami's most recent book - and the "hugely enjoyable" history of queer women like Stein, Toklas, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach has won an LGBTQ-specific prize in Britain. - The Guardian (UK)
“There is no such thing as an individual work in literature.” The work is always part of a “system of literature,” in which the arts are interrelated. Indeed, “f a literary work is torn from the context of one literary system and moved to another, it will take on a different coloring. - LA Review of Books
“There’s this fantastic description of the gothic – that it is not a genre at all, but a virus that attaches itself to genres and infects texts, and also morphs through time and adapts as needed. I think horror perhaps could be seen as the same thing.” - The Guardian
Faced with uncertainty surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancients rushed to fill in gaps, in essence producing a biography of the poet who, it was assumed, must have lived at some point in the past. - Lapham's Quarterly
