Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, who spent much of her adult life in Paris, died on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. Gallant was best-known in the US for stories published in the New Yorker (she wrote more than one hundred tales for them over the years). In 2013, the magazine’s fiction podcast featured Margaret Atwood reading and discussing Gallant’s story “Voices Lost in Snow,” and in 2007, Antonya Nelson read “When We Were Nearly Young.” Gallant’s work was collected in one volume in 1996, and the New York Review of Books have published several collections in recent years. Fellow Canadian author Michael Ondaatje said of Gallant: “She was our great writer. My hero.”
BBC News has written an open letter to Egyptian authorities about Australian correspondent Peter Greste, who is currently in prison in Cairo and about to be tried for writing news reports that were “damaging to national security.”
A trailer for Matt Wolf’s new film Teenage, based on Jon Savage’s book about the emergence of the teenager as a cultural identity.
Authors and small press publishers are upset that the AWP conference, held this year in Seattle, won’t have a day that is open to the public, and, worst of all, that this disappointing news is just being announced now—a little over a week before it opens.
Billy Corgan is planning an eight-hour ambient-music performance influenced by Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
Recently, after President Obama made a dismissive remark about students of art history, a professor of art history at the University of Texas wrote a letter of complaint. The president, in turn, penned a personal apology. Hyperallergic reproduces the hand-written missive.
Haruki Murakami has a new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years or Pilgrimage, coming out in the US this summer. When the book was released in Japan last April, it reportedly sold more than a million copies in its first week.