Read some new fiction of mine in The Collagist, an excellent new online mag from Dzanc Books.
Tell the winner before you send out the media alert. An editor friend of mine got this note on Monday:
New York-based writer Nam Le was tonight (10.11.08) named the winner of this year’s £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut collection of short stories, The Boat....
Nam Le will NOT be aware that he has won until 9.15pm BMT this evening (10.11.08), therefore, he will not be available for interview until after this time.
I guess not.
Now that the election is safely behind us...
Arts & Letters Daily linked to my Frankenstein story yesterday. Please take a look if you're in a textual-scholarship mood. The TLS also has a review up of Charles Robinson's new edition; their take focuses more on the novel's back story (cold, rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron's challenge to the party to come up with ghost stories, etc.) and on its reception history.
It's been a light posting week--sorry. Journalism has been getting in the way. I've also expended too much energy fretting over the Nobel Lit prize and recent fighting words from Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, about how backwards American lit is:
"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he told the Associated Press. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."
Well, he's entitled to his opinion, ignorant and insular as it may be. What really got my goat was how seriously American lierary folk took his comments. He stuck a knife--a small one, maybe, but sharp enough to sting--right into the heart of American insecurity, which runs as deep in this culture as our sense of exceptionalism does. Our culturati still, after 232 years, have a tendency to look over their shoulders at Europe.
Without sounding like an arrogant and provincial American, I have to ask: Why do we care what some dude in Sweden thinks? Writers write what they write, and ours are no exception. Sometimes it's regional, sometimes it's universal. The two are hardly incompatible.
Oh, and why is it okay, in 2008, to claim that Europe is the center of the literary world? Does the literary world even have a center? Should it? Does handing out a million-dollar prize buy you the right to decide? I don't think so.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is no doubt a very lovely thing for the winning authors and their publishers. But if Americans won it every other year, it still wouldn't mean a damn thing, really.
In the N.B. column of its April 4 issue, the Times Literary Supplement discusses my recent article about a dustup among Coleridge scholars. (The controversy turns on claims that Coleridge anonymously translated Goethe's Faust; Oxford University Press recently published the text in question as Faustus, From the German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick.) The column isn't online, as far as I can tell, but here's an excerpt:
Howard describes the title OUP gave the book as "provocatively definitive," and claims that the debate "has pitted old acquaintances against each other" (Coleridgeans, she suggests, take tea together and go for walking tours of the Lake District).
I don't remember mentioning tea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Coleridgeans take it together. Regardless, I'm delighted to score some ink in the TLS.
Some other people did too.
My former employer, The Washington Post, really cleaned up this time around. I remember a speech that Len Downie made to the newsroom a few years back--one of the years when the paper nabbed no Pulitzers--in which he said, "We are not defined by the prizes we win." Or don't win.
