Nobel Prize
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A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
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The Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to… Kenny G
Rumpus editors share our Nobel Prize in Literature predictions with you!
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #9: Punk the Deadline!
Oh my god, I’m stuck again. A truck in the muck. A cat up a tree. An explorer in quicksand. Winnie the Pooh in the door of Rabbit’s house. Trying to birth a column and needing a Caesarean. Is there…
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Selma Lagerlöf, an Exception to the Rule
Since the the first Nobel Prize was awarded, Cassie Gonzales explains in “An Unconventional Nobel Laureate” at the Ploughshares blog, the Laureate winner list has not been a bastion of diversity. However, Selma Lagerlöf was an exception—in her brief, funny essay, Gonzalez explains…
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Dylan’s Controversial Nobel
The Nobel Prize in Literature went to Bob Dylan this year, sparking debate around the songwriter’s legacy and whether song lyrics should be considered poetry. Those in the pro camp attribute the win to the persistent singularity of Dylan’s songwriting, in combination with…
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Engdahl’s Game
Another year, another Nobel Prize in Literature not given to Don DeLillo. At The New Republic, Alex Shephard argues that DeLillo should have been a contender: …of all the leading American Nobel candidates, DeLillo is a writer of the moment. In an…
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And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…
Bob Dylan? At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel acknowledged that no one is quite sure how to feel about the news. At Slate, Stephen Metcalf praises Bob Dylan’s genius, but argues that he’s a musician, not a poet: The objection here…
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A Bigger Wall
Yesterday, The Millions featured an exclusive “essay” from a certain Republican presidential hopeful about his plan to make Western literature great again: We’re going to take back the Western canon, folks. We are going to build a big beautiful wall…
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Reporting as Literature
Reporter and writer Svetlana Alexievich recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. In a piece for the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch brings up some questions that this poses about the relationship between reportage literature and other forms—is one more necessary or relevant in…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) The historical quagmire of a plantation tour. When your father’s dark side is really, really dark. Also, the dark side of the Nobel prize.…
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Tranströmer in Memoriam
Tomas Tranströmer, the beloved Swedish poet and Nobel laureate, has passed away at age 83. Tranströmer was notable for the economy of his work, its quiet optimism, and the insights it brought from the poet’s long career as an industrial…
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A Nobel Refusal
Jean-Paul Sartre became the only Nobel literature laureate to voluntarily decline the honor in 1964, but as newly released archives from the Swedish Academy reveal, it was at least partially due to a failure in correspondence. Sartre wrote to the…