The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, announced last night, include Paul Beatty (for fiction), Maggie Nelson (for criticism), Ross Gay (for poetry), and Margo Jefferson (for autobiography).
At The Baffler, Chris Lehmann paints a vivid picture of the Breitbart media operation and its workings.
William Brennan has a piece on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish Gaelic masterpiece, Cré na Cille, written in the 1940s and only now available in English translation (two translations, in fact, with two different titles: The Dirty Dust and Graveyard Clay). Ó Cadhain’s novel, his debut, was initially rejected by a publisher as too “Joycean.”
On The Cut, writer Meaghan O’Connell has a piece about the “concerned” questions women have to field when they write on more personal subjects—questions, for instance, about what their children or parents might think of them. “We don’t ask male artists to consider the consequences of their work,” O’Connell writes, “we don’t reframe them as fathers or boyfriends or sons. We don’t keep trying to pull them back down to earth, to admonish them, the way we do women. We not only give them the benefit of the doubt—assuming they’ve done their own calculus as to how much is worth what, whom they’re willing to betray or embarrass or make uncomfortable and why—we operate as if their work is worth all that.”
Blockbuster director Zack Snyder apparently plans to adapt Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for the screen. He sees the book as “such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something”—which is certainly one way of looking at it.
The Huffington Post interviews the editor of the print and online magazine Posture (its “Ornamentation” issue recently came out), who wants to remedy a situation in which “too often ideas and aesthetics are taken from the underprivileged and the queer underground without credit.”
