Probably all of us have been inside a place like Town Square location #1512, the fictional big-box store that provides the setting for Adelle Waldman’s new novel, Help Wanted. It’s the kind with colorful seasonal displays and wide aisles, the kind that in the ’80s and ’90s came to signify the peak of American commerce: the convenience of being able to buy baby food, a lawn mower, and a plastic Christmas tree all in one brightly lit, airplane-hangar-size space.
„Literary Theory for Robots“ von Dennis Yi Tenen, einem Software-Ingenieur, der zum Literaturprofessor wurde, zeigt, wie die „Intelligenz“ in der künstlichen Intelligenz irreduzibel menschlich ist.
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The strangely short history of a publishing niche.
As an English professor, I’m often asked, “What do you like to read?” Sometimes I answer, “Literary fiction.” By that phrase, I mean fiction that privileges art over entertainment. I did not know until recently that literary fiction—the phrase, not what
In 1968, the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot for a bloody satire about a fictional African country called “Bound to Violence.” Opening in mock epic style with the brutality of a medieval empire, and ending amid baroque assassinations in the mid-twentieth century, it vents its spleen in every direction: at slave traffickers, native and foreign; corrupt clerics and mercenary anthropologists; and, especially, oppressive rulers who used idyllic visions of the African past to hoodwink their countrymen.
Martin Walser, among the last of a generation of acerbic, socially engaged novelists who dominated the German literary scene after World War II, died on July 26 in Überlingen, Germany, a city on Lake Constance, along the Swiss border. He was 96.
His publisher, Rowohlt, announced his death in a statement but did not provide a cause.
Alongside writers like Henrich Böll, Günter Grass and Siegfried Lenz, Mr. Walser wrote essays, plays and novels that skewered what they saw as
Milan Kundera, a Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 94.
A spokeswoman for Gallimard, Mr. Kundera’s publisher in France, said on Wednesday that Mr. Kundera had died “after a prolonged illness.”
Mr. Kundera’s run of popular books began with “The Joke,” which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the
Emily Ratajkowski looked glamorous while attending the 2023 PEN America Spring Literary Gala held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Thursday.
The 31-year-old model — who’s the author of My Body, a collection of personal essays — slipped her formidable figure into a floor-length black gown, which she paired with black sandal heels.
The Vogue cover girl wore her lustrous dark tresses parted in the middle and cascading down her shoulders in a straight style,
The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two directions—either the long-promised wave of retirements and a deluge of open positions, or a decisive sign that the hiring trend line was never going to reverse its downward course. Imagine not quite knowing what would happen—even if that is now, in fact,
A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:
When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and
What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer’s work, but a literary biographer’s central concern isn’t a writer’s work; it’s the writer’s life. And, though the gods of capitalism may grumble at my saying this, an artist’s work and life are radically separate things. The art comes alive only when it meets another mind, like desert seeds that wait patiently until a freak rainfall
