Weekend Reading

"Goorie-Koori author Evelyn Araluen has been announced as the 2022 winner of the highly-coveted Stella Prize. The annual women's award recognises outstanding writing by a local author, and furnishes the winner with a lucrative prize [of $60,000.]"
NITV

"Roy said that she recently asked a pilot friend of hers whether he could fly a plane backwards. 'He laughed out loud,' she said. 'I said "this is exactly what is happening here". The leaders of this country are flying the plane in reverse, everything is falling, and we are headed for a crash.'"
Scroll

"Setting aside Sally Rooney, who has become such a global phenom that she wrote a novel about it, there are Naoise Dolan, Mike McCormack, Claire Keegan. And there is Colin Barrett, who owns the domain of the short story."
Los Angeles Times

"Poguemahone, living up to its author’s reputation, is daring, studded with brilliance, raucous and exhausting. It might overstay its welcome, but you’ll remember its visit."
The New York Times

"At a time when many global crises demand a better understanding of our societies, when humanities funding is waning in many places, Denecke thinks that adding to MIT’s strengths in humanistic knowledge and adapting the humanities to the challenges of our age, especially in the area of social justice, is a worthy ideal."
MIT News

"As enormous amounts of natural gas flowed from Russia to Western Europe...literary scholars like the University of Copenhagen’s Professor Mikhail Suslov, the Russian writer Maria Galina, and National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy PhD student Mariia Shuvalova, have charted, via their analysis of the irredentist themes in Russian science fiction or speculative fiction towards Ukraine, the failure of this European dream."
University World News

"No one writes books in order to win a particular prize and then retire. That would be a very strange motivation, right? I certainly hope to squeeze a few more books out of my tortured psyche before the end. That remains my ambition. And I don’t think winning the Booker is going to make that project even slightly easier. Probably the opposite."
Brisbane Times

"[Life and Fate] travels between the battle’s several fronts, but also to Moscow and to evacuee life in Kazan and Kuibyshev (now Samara). Those not directly involved in the fighting are drawn into other, potentially lethal battles with Stalinist bureaucracy and restrictions on free speech and research, or with its police and penal system."
The Irish Times

"Saying that a foreign author has been “discovered” when their work is finally translated into English or released in the U.S. is a marketing trope—one that usually ignores how prominent, prolific, or acclaimed a writer is in their own right. It also highlights the publishing industry’s marginalization of authors who write in other languages...."
The Atlantic

"Two new collections of contemporary Chinese free verse poetry in translation also grapple with this morass that we call home. Wang Yin’s Ghosts City Sea, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, meditates on haunted Shanghai streets and the rugged beaches of Brittany, France, with an intermission of photos by the author that are peopled by silhouettes and shadows from his travels in Asia, Europe, and North America. Yu Xiuhua takes us on a very different journey in the poems and essays of Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, a journey that is at once inward and expansive, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain."
Los Angeles Review of Books