Links / Literature
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Drawing comparisons to the late Joan Didion, Gopnik outlines why Ernaux’s win of the Nobel Prize in Literature signifies an importance of memoir as a genre in times of Twitter and TikTok. I have not read enough of Ernaux’s work and am therefore in what he describes as the second camp, but The Years was one of my favourite books read in 2021. Time to head to the book store once more.
"Her ascension marks a recognition that memoir, in all its many faces and poses—direct, self-critical, rueful and comic, engagé and not—is perhaps the leading genre of our time, as much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century."
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Three of Fitzcarraldo’s authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and they have not been in business for even 10 years. The New York Times published a profile on the publishing house. Trying to account for the Nobel success, Testard [the founder of Fitzcarraldo] said that his taste just happened to align with "a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people." Delightful!
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Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, already, one of my favourite books I’ve read in 2022. It’s an incredible and sensitively written book. He has now won a MacArthur "genius" grant, and spoke to The New Yorker about his approach to writing.
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“You didn’t have to agree with her, but you had to submit to her sentences.”
In remembrance of Joan Didion, who passed away late in 2021.