The Nobel Prize in literature may be canceled this year due to a series of accusations of sexual abuse. In November, French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, who is married to Nobel academy Katarina Frostenson, was accused of sexual assault or harassment by eighteen women. If the prize is not given, it will be the first time it has been withheld since World War II. The Swedish Academy will make its decision this week, on May 3.
Ninety years after it was completed, Zora Neale Hurston’s book about a former slave, Barracoon, is being published this week by Amistad press.
The Home School in Hudson, New York, will be offering its annual poetry conference this summer from July 29 through August 3. “The key inspiration for Home School Hudson,” says the website, “is John Ashbery’s 19th-century Hudson residence, a carefully composed collage-environment the poet has constructed and curated over thirty-five years with an eclectic array of fine art by European and American masters, furniture, pottery, textiles, bric-a-brac, toys, and other objects—all organized in an architecturally-distinguished setting.” This year’s faculty includes poets CAConrad, Adam Fitzgerald, Myung Mi Kim, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Frank Wilderson III, and Divya Victor, Che Gossett. The school has extended its deadline for applications until May 1.
LARB has an article about the cultural phenomenon of Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Ji-young Born 1982, which was the bestselling novel in Korea last year, and became so popular that the government drew on it for a recent PR campaign.
On Wednesday night in New York, George Saunders appears at the New York Public Library, and Geoff Dyer talks with filmmaker Michael Almereyda at Brooklyn’s Murmrr Ballroom.