Critics reflect on novelist Kazuo Ishiguro winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. At The Guardian, John Mullan writes that “the Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last year attention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right.” The New York Times’s Dwight Garner praised Ishiguro for creating “worlds that are clear in a sentence-by-sentence way, but in which the big picture recedes against the horizon.” The Washington Post’s Ron Charles observes that the award “looks like a course correction” after last year’s prize went to Bob Dylan. At the New Yorker, James Woods’s wonders whether Ishiguro, who studied under Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, “may well be the first product of a creative-writing course to win the Nobel.”
Poetry Will Save Your Life author Jill Bialosky is being accused of plagiarizing parts of her most recent memoir. William Logan, a critic at the Tourniquet Review, said that while working on a review of Poetry Will Save Your Life, he found language throughout the book that was extremely similar to writing found on Wikipedia, Poetry Foundation, and other websites.
ProPublica is creating new program to fund investigative reporting at publications in smaller cities. The Local Reporting Network will pay the salary of a full-time investigative reporter for one year as they work on a reported project in a city with a population of less than one million.
The New Yorker has added Masha Gessen and Troy Patterson to its roster of writers at newyorker.com. Gessen will cover politics, while Patterson will write about television.
At The Millions, Lauren Marie Scovel considers the lack of diversity in Hogarth Press’s Shakespeare project. Scovel notes that all eight authors in the series are white, the majority are men, and only one is under 50 years old. “Although each author did achieve some success within their own adaptation,” she writes, “imagine how rewarding the series would have been had it featured writers whose backgrounds varied more drastically from Shakespeare himself.”
The New York Times reports on producer Harvey Weinstein’s numerous sexual harassment allegations and settlements. Over the past thirty years, the paper found evidence of at least eight settlements with different women due to claims of sexual harassment and assault. One day before the article was published, the Hollywood Reporter noted that Weinstein had hired a team of lawyers to fight the then-unpublished articles. After the story broke, Weinstein released a statement to the Times stating that though he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” he now knows that “it’s not an excuse,” and plans to take time off “to deal with this issue head on.”
