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The forthcoming film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005, stars Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, James Gandolfini, and 2010 Jeopardy! Kids Week champ Thomas Horn.
After odds were released earlier this week citing Syrian poet Adonis as top contender for this year's Nobel Prize for literature, the Millions released an open letter calling for Philip Roth to receive the honor—one of the only major awards missing from the Connecticut writer's resumé.
As of Monday's forecast by British gambling company Ladbroke's, Roth has twenty-five-to-one odds of taking the Nobel, given to an author who has produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."
"Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for literature before he dies?" begins the letter, written by Michael Bourne, who recognizes Roth for his brilliance at tackling the subject of "the essential unknowableness of the human heart."
"The case for Roth's candidacy for a Nobel Prize isn't that he's a nice guy; it is that he's a genius, and in Roth's case, his genius lies in his audacity," Bourne says. "Audacity without intelligence begets mindless spectacle, but Philip Roth is the smartest living writer in America, and his work, good and bad, brilliant and puerile, is among the best this country has ever produced."
According to Ladbroke's, among the authors heading up the list of Roth's competition are Tomas Tranströmer (with projected odds of nine to two), Thomas Pynchon (ten to one), and Haruki Murakami (sixteen to one). Fellow American luminaries Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates join Roth in the twenty-five-to-one camp.
The winner of the ten-million-kronor prize (approximately $1,463,830) will be announced on a yet-undisclosed Thursday in October.
Hal Hartley, the filmmaker who brought us such indie classics as Trust (1990), Amateur (1994), and Henry Fool (1997), directed this short video featuring Amanda Stern in conversation with Paul LaFarge, author of Luminous Airplanes, which is both a novel (forthcoming from FSG in October) and a large online fiction, or immersive text.
Steve Almond has a little fun with Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and others at Fox News in this trailer for his story collection God Bless America, forthcoming from Lookout Books in October.
The sixth annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize, recognizing "the power of the written word to promote peace," was awarded yesterday to novelist Chang-Rae Lee and journalist-cum-memoirist Wilbert Rideau. Lee received the ten-thousand-dollar award for his fourth novel, The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Rideau won for his memoir, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (Knopf).
Lee's novel unfolds during the Korean War, examining the repercussions of violence in the decades that follow the event. "This is a big novel which steadily transcends any thematic constraints and steps into real art," says fiction judge Ron Carlson, adding, "the dimensions of the book insist on a gritty and complex understanding of our best impulses in the worst of times."
Nonfiction judge Eric Bates says of Rideau's book, completed after the author spent forty-four years incarcerated in Louisiana prisons, "For his reporting alone, Rideau has made a critical and lasting contribution to our understanding of a prison system that long ago gave up on the notion of rehabilitation. But his memoir goes far beyond the limitations of journalism. He brings to his story a deep devotion to the power of literature, drawing on traditions as diverse as Saint Augustine and Frederick Douglass to craft a dramatic and moving tale that is both deeply felt and richly observed."
The winners will be presented their awards at a ceremony on November 13 in Dayton, Ohio, the seat of the historic Dayton Peace Accords, initialed there in November 1995.
In the video below, Lee discusses his winning book with Leonard Lopate of New York City public radio station WNYC.
Director Simon Ennis's film Up in Cottage Country, an official selection of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, tells the tale of a man who finds himself in an alternate universe that turns out to be the basis of the story his wife is reading: Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony."
Read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Wells Towers’s story “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” Both stories integrate the ancient and the contemporary in surprising and disturbing ways. (For another example read Matthew Sharpe’s novel Jamestown [Soft Skull Press, 2007]). Draft a story that does the same thing, blending the past and the present into the fictional elements of plot, setting, dialogue, and character.
"I think the funnest part of running a bookstore is treasure hunting...going through those boxes and coming up with hidden treasures," says Jeffrey Frase, owner of Cameron's Books, the second-oldest used-book store in Portland, Oregon. "It's just like being a kid again." Directors Jin Ryu and Yi-Fan Lu spent two months getting to know Frase before asking if they could film this five-minute documentary.
Much of Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights was shot on a handheld camera. The movie, starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson as Cathy and Heathcliff, will be released in the U.K. on November 11.
In November OR Books will publish Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward, a frequent contributor to the magazine who wrote "The Art of Reading Nathanael West: Simple Was His Pilgrimage and Brief" for the May/June 2007 issue. This is a clip from John Schlesinger's 1975 film adaptation of West's novel The Day of the Locust, starring Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, and Geraldine Page.
