Nobel Dreams

1. After a whole lot of passionate (and incorrect) guessing, Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature (the dapper fellow above just announced it on a live webcast from Stockholm). I must admit that, while I once enjoyed hearing from this Peruvian novelist at a New York reading with Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, I don’t know much about his work as a whole. I’m looking forward to learning more. And, yeah, I do wish Ngugi wa Thiong’o had taken it. Maybe next year.

2. A Ted Hughes poem dealing directly with his wife Sylvia Plath’s suicide has been revealed for the first time.

3. I like Julie Taymor and I really like William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I’m pretty psyched about a new Julie Taymor film of The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren as a female Prospero, along with the likes of Russell Brand and Alan Cumming in various roles.


4. Susan Hill ponders whether or not a writer must tweet.

5. Human Landscapes.

6. Can’t get enough of those HTMLGiant literary doppelgangers.

7. Don’t Forget The Motor City by David Bryne.

8. I’m not particularly freaked out (as some are) that Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground, one of the most exciting rock drummers of all time (she used mallets instead of sticks, and drummed standing up) is now Tea Partying. Maybe she’s a philosophical Tea Partier. (It’s also worth noting, if only barely, that the Velvet Underground used to play a hip Boston club called the Boston Tea Party).

9. Typographical Origins (no, it’s not a Yes album, it just sounds like one).

10. Our old friend Dr. Seuss used to make sculptures of his fictional creatures. Some of them are now for sale on E-Bay.

11. Also on E-Bay: 1960s environmental absurdist Edward Abbey’s sweet Cadillac.

12. A great quote from Barack Obama on meeting Bob Dylan at the White House.

13. Emily Gould on Eileen Myles at the Poetry Foundation.

14. The great Harold Pinter in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Pinter sure could turn out a chilly look.

4 Responses

  1. And here I was looking
    And here I was looking forward to your disgust when Cormac won the Nobel lol. You dodged a bullet good sir.

    Loved the Obama quote…very apt.

  2. Personal Vargas Llosa
    Personal Vargas Llosa recommendations: “Feast of the Goat” is an extraordinarily affecting historical novel. I’d start there. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” is very playful and fun to read, if a bit weirdly dated in places. “The War at the End of the World” is supposed to be his masterpiece, though I’ve never read it. “The Bad Girl” starts off well, and then descends into unreadable ridiculousness — avoid if at all possible.

  3. I like your ‘variety’ posts
    I like your ‘variety’ posts with numerous unrelated items. There are always at least a couple that are of interest to me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

What We're Up To ...

Litkicks will turn 30 years old in the summer of 2024! We can’t believe it ourselves. We don’t run as many blog posts about books and writers as we used to, but founder Marc Eliot Stein aka Levi Asher is busy running two podcasts. Please check out our latest work!