This Week in Reading April 19 - 25

This Week in Reading

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, April 20 with many awards for journalism and one for music. Here are the literary awards this year:

Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Drama - Ruined (to be published) by Lynn Nottage

History - The Hemingses of Monticello: an American family by Annette Gordon-Reed

Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin

General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: the re-enslavement of black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

Obituaries

Science Fiction novelist, story writer J. G. Ballard (1930 – 2009), was a strong influence on cyberpunk and music with particularly dystopian themes.

Authors Born This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature
Playwright Jose Echegaray (1904), Poet Carl Spitteler (1919), Novelist Halidor Laxness (1955)

Novelists and story writers Henry Fielding, Madame de Stael, Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Ellen Glasgow, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Jan de Hartog, Ross Lockridge, Maurice Druon, J. P. Donleavey, Steve Erickson, Sebastian Faulks

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Ted Kooser, Louise Gluck, James Fenton Playwrights William Shakespeare, Elaine May, Jason Miller, Eric Bogosian

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Max Weber Believers: Shirley MacLaine, James Dobson Scientists: John Muir, Otto Rank, J. Robert Oppenheimer Biographers::Patricia Bosworth

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Humorists: Artemus Ward Essayists: Helen Prejean, Phillip Longman, Dinesh D’Souza Editors Fiona Kelleghan Journalists: Edward R. Murrow, Andrew Tobias Others: Aaron Spellling, John Waters, Michael Moore

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery Ngaio Marsh, John Mortimer, Sue Grafton

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Peter S. Beagle, Avram Davidson Science Fiction: Steven Silver

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik


Events to Read About

It’s all about preservation this week. The Library of Congress exists to preserve the written word, and the Mosaic browser helped us preserve words and graphics on the Internet. We also need to preserve our memories of what did happen to a past generation in Armenia and we need to preserve the earth for future generations.

This Week’s Questions

There are old and new Globe Theatres, and there are many Shakespeare companies, of course, and Shakespeare Festivals, but can you name one theater named after William Shakespeare?

Who else born this week, has had a theatre named after them?

Answers to Last Week’s Questions

Anatole France was born in France and lived there all his life. There is no record in the biographies of these authors (in Biography Resource Center) of Samuel Beckett changing his Irish citizenship for French though he lived in France for the rest of his life after moving there for World War Two. J. M. G. le Clezio was born in France to parents who were still citizens of Mauritius and thus had two citizenships, French and Mauritian, though he called himself a Frenchman.

Beckett was born in the Republic of Ireland, and Seamus Heaney was born in the country of Northern Ireland, the two countries that now co-exist more or less peacefully on the Emerald Isle we call Ireland.

Beckett taught in French at the University of Dublin before moving to France for the remainder of his life; le Clezio has taught in the French language in several countries, including recent posts in the United States.

Heaney has not published novels (and we apologize profusely for having said so incorrectly on our this week list). Le Clezio does not yet write plays, nor poetry, but he has written books for children which may have elements of both. Beckett and France wrote all three. All four Nobel prizewinners wrote essays and nonfiction books as well.

The Index Liborum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), was a list of books condemned by the Catholic Church. It existed in various forms from the sixteenth century until it was abolished by Pope Paul Vi in 1966. Its last edition was published in 1948 and included at least two works by Anatole France after he had won the Nobel Prize.

This Week in Reading April 12 - 18

This Week's names in the library.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Novelist Anatole France (1921), Playwright, novelist Samuel Beckett (1969), Poet Seamus Heaney (1995), Novelist J. M. G. LeClezio (2007)

Obituaries

American Library Association director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, creator of Banned Books Week, Judith Krug (1940 – 2009)

Novelists and story writers

Henry James, Richard Harding Davis, Robert Walser, Isak Dinesen, Nella Larson, Eudora Welty, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Cynthia Ozick, Scott Turow, Nick Hornby

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Tristan Tzara Playwrights: Edward De Vere, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Alexandre Ostrovski, John Millington Synge, Thornton Wilder, Lanford Wilson, Alan Ayckbourn

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Emile Durkheim George Lukacs Scientists: Thomas Szasz Historians: Niall Ferguson

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Journalists: Margaret Adler Officials: Thomas Jefferson Others: Clarence Darrow, Charlie Chaplin, Peter Ustinov, Erich von Daniken, David Letterman, Heloise, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Delores Gordon–Smith Suspense: Jeffrey Archer

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Science Fiction: Boris Strugatsky, Keith R. A. deCandido, Bruce Sterling

Visual Artists
Illustrators: Garth Williams

Young People’s Writers
Children’s Authors: Beverly Cleary Teen Authors: Benjamin Zephaniah

Events to read about

Easter, Passover, important dates in dictionaries and atlases, art, space, baseball, Da Vinci, and Chaucer. Oh, and by the way, this is National Library Week. So it’s also Fine Free Week. Get your books back and take out some more.

This Week’s Questions: There are four Nobel prizewinners this week, so here’s a literature question in the form of an awkward logic puzzle.

Of these four, three lived in France, and two were born there, but only one was solely a French citizen. Who was it?

Two were born on the Emerald Isle but not in the same country. Why not?

Which two taught college courses in the French language and wrote their main works in the French language while living in English speaking countries?

Three wrote novels, one did not. Three wrote plays, one did not. Three wrote poems, one did not. Who did not, in each category?

[In honor of Judith Krug] One wrote works banned by the Index Liborum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) even after he won the Nobel prize. Who was it? And what is that index?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions: (1) As young literary critic William Hazlitt effusively praised and became a devoted follower and welcome sycophant of poet William Wordsworth by saying of him: "He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere."

(2) But years later an older Hazlitt found he could not, even for social reasons, refrain from criticizing a poem Wordsworth had written and so Wordsworth then said of him in a letter to a friend, “I hope that you do not associate with the fellow; he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society.” So much for professional courtesy.

(3) Often called a “decadent” poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne was also a formidable literary critic, who, on a trip to France, found the poems of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to be irresistible. His effusive words popularized the French poet in the English speaking world: "It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather--a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it; thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light.”