China Miéville: “Was More’s utopia blueprint, or satire, or something else? As if these are exclusive. As if all utopias are not always all of the above, in degrees that vary as much in the context of their reception as of their creation. … But the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary.”

Citing Baldwin’s “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they … have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors,” Scott Korb looks at why “such claims against white Americans didn’t make sense to students who believed they had never believed such things.”

So this experiment goes well: “I apologize a lot. I try to assure the international book community that not all of America has lost its goddamn mind.”

The translation was a well-funded, politically motivated effort to show that Muslims were just as smart as, and in many cases smarter and more philosophically advanced than, Greek-speaking Christians.

Slimani won for her thriller “Chanson Deuce.” She “left Morocco for France at 17 and enrolled at Sciences Po in Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious universities, made her entrance onto the literary scene in 2014 with the critically acclaimed novel “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” (“In the Ogre’s Garden”), a look at the life of a sex-addicted woman in some of the most chic neighborhoods of Paris.”