Links / Literature
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Anne Carson, 2021. Photo by Christopher Sherman One more on Anne Carson, this time by Ella Frears, who I am proud previously wrote for TRANSCRIPT. She makes the case in ArtReview for Carson as a Laureate for our times: endlessly curious, irreverent, easily bored.
When asked what drives Carson to change form with every book, she answered:
Boredom, I guess.
Frears covers Carson’s range beautifully, and ends on a reading in a London bookshop in 2013:
There is no such thing as highbrow or lowbrow in Carson’s oeuvre – there is only interest and language; boredom and brilliance.
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Hoon Lee as Lee in East of Eden. Image courtesy of Netflix Over the last two days my partner and I started and finished East of Eden, Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel, which I haven’t read. It engulfed us from the first episode. I much prefer a limited series to one built to run for seasons: its makers have to be precise, because there is no time to waste.
Hoon Lee as Lee and Ciarán Hinds as Sam Hamilton. Image courtesy of Netflix Kazan delivered a fantastic piece of work, and Florence Pugh is great as Cathy Ames, but it’s Ciarán Hinds as Sam Hamilton and Hoon Lee as Lee, the Chinese American caretaker of the Trask family, I will remember most. Lee stole the show.
Here he is talking to Esquire about what the book and the show did to him. He hadn’t read the novel either, until the audition scenes arrived. He finished it in a weekend.
No matter what happened with the audition, I felt the book had come to me as a gift. When I went into that audition, it was almost to thank them for bringing me the book.
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Declan Spring, Mieke Chew and Barbara Epler of New Directions. Photo by Vincent Alban for The New York Times In light of Anne Carson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (so very much deserved), I was hoping for profiles to hit the internet and found this one, on New Directions, Carson’s publisher. They keep winning Nobels (much like Fitzcarraldo).
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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.