Last night, the NBCC announced its 2010 award winners, which included Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (fiction), C.D. Wright’s One with Others (poetry), and Clare Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics (criticism). We were thrilled to see that Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live won the award for biography; her meditation on French essayist Montaigne is not just intelligent and engaging but probably the best self-help book we’ve ever come across.
The Rumpus Book Club has announced its May selections: Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco and Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones.
Daniel Okrent, the author of 2010’s superb Last Call, a study of American Prohibition, is writing the “Week in Culture” diary for the Paris Review’s blog, and he doesn’t even talk about drinking! But he does watch Three Sisters, meet Mark Strand (“much too tall and handsome for his own good. But at least he’s old”), and gripe about the Yankees.
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jay Parini examines Henry James’s legacy. “Why does James attract this attention? And will he enjoy the lasting mystique of someone like Jane Austen?”
