This year's Orange prize winner
In today’s news, find out which American author took home the Orange prize, what Stieg Larsson was up to at 17, and how The New Yorker shapes our literary tastes. Enjoy!
- Earlier this week, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna took home the Orange prize for fiction, beating out Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Lorrie Morre’s A Gate at the Stairs. The win came as a surprise to some critics, but judges praised The Lacuna‘s “breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy.” The Guardian gives a great overview of the book and talks to Kingsolver about the win.
- And from literary greatness to more amateur attempts, Sweden’s national library has acquired the unpublished, science fiction manuscripts Stieg Larsson wrote as a seventeen-year-old. Some in the lit world wonder if Larsson would have wanted such early pieces to be read–after all, would you want colleagues to read your teenage fiction attempts? Shelf Life calls the issue “a good reminder to all of us to burn or lock away in a safe buried beneath the sea any potentially incriminating prose.”
- For years, The New Yorker has been the diamond standard for short fiction–but does that mean you always have to like the stories it publishes? The Millions blogger Frank Kovarik tackles this question in an article inspired by the magazine’s “Twenty Writers Under Forty” issue, out this week. He discusses his own experience with The New Yorker‘s fiction and wonders how influential the magazine is in shaping literary taste. His final thoughts? “Say what you will, The New Yorker is one of our culture’s most stalwart curators of this type of literary experience. For that reason, its editors’ vision of the future of fiction is worth considering.”
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