They’re fed up and don’t want to take it anymore, after the last two years of the prize have resulted in wins from U.S. authors. “The crescendo of frustration may have reached a peak. A group that counts the literary heavyweights Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its members has fired a shot across the bow, demanding that the Man Booker Foundation reverse a 2014 decision making any novel written in English and published in Britain eligible for the prize.”
Tag: 03.30.18
Social Media May Well Be Our New Oral History, As The Shrimp Fried Rice Thread Shows
Seriously: “Fewer and fewer people look to old stories for real enlightenment these days, and for many, questions of right and wrong can seem old-fashioned. But that’s not to say there isn’t a hunger for a discourse that can teach us what behavior is praiseworthy. Now, we look to Twitter.”
Bringing Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Book To The Stage In A Crystallized Moment Of Intense Pain
Though Coates said he was “really tired and kind of suspicious” as the book became a bestseller and cultural touchstone in 2015 – and he resisted his friend Kamilah Forbes’ ideas about turning it into a staged performance – he eventually gave her the stage rights and stepped away from the project, which runs at the Apollo and the Kennedy Center this week. “It won’t quite be a play or a straight recitation of the celebrated book, which won the National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Excerpts and fragments will be read either solo or in groups by a cast that includes the actress Angela Bassett and the rappers Common and Black Thought. Projections visualizing Mr. Coates’s vivid imagery will tower behind them, and the jazz musician Jason Moran will perform a live score with a trio.”
The Small-Town Welsh Actor Set To Become The Next Bollywood Star
University student (and English major) Banita Sandhu grew up in Caerleon, Wales, but she had to go to India to find commercial actiing success. “While Bollywood is traditionally perceived as less progressive than western cinema, Sandhu expresses frustration with the lack of three-dimensional roles for Asian women in the UK. ‘I struggled to fit into their version of what a British Asian girl is,’ she says. ‘As a third-generation British Indian, I’m not affected by problems like arranged marriages. That stereotype is from 30 years ago and that’s not where we are at now as a society.'”
Can The Practice Of Dance Be Medically Useful?
Aimee Meredith Cox, an associate professor at Yale, might say so. “While working in Brooklyn, Detroit, and Newark, Cox noticed communities, particularly communities of women, gathering together to create a common place for making art, utilizing such forms of expression, in some ways, as a form of protest.”
A Conversation With Playwright Tony Kushner About ‘Angels In America’ – And Surviving Trump
As “Angels” gets major revivals on both coasts (and “Caroline, or Change” transfers to the West End in London), Kushner says he’s tried to get his most famous work out of his head – but he just keeps taking notes on productions, and then revising, or maybe creating a new project … about Angels. “I’m thinking of putting together a book, a user’s guide to the play, by taking all the notes and offering brief descriptions of the characters and then walking actors and directors through the entire thing.”
Anita Shreve, Author Whose Literary Novels Were Painted As ‘Commercial’ After Oprah Chose One For H71er Book Club, Has Died At
Shreve enjoyed putting her protagonists, usually women, in stressful situations. She “drew critical acclaim and a large following with books like ‘The Weight of Water’ (1997), an intricate story involving a long-ago crime and present-day dramas. Susan Kenney, reviewing that book in The New York Times, described it as ‘a cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above.'”
Marie-Agnès Gillot, Paris Opera Ballet’s Most Unlikely Étoile, Retires At 42
“Everything was against Marie-Agnes Gillot becoming a ballerina – never mind a great one. She was too tall, broad-shouldered and most of all, she had a double scoliosis, which sometimes gives her a hump when her back is swollen. … The last great French ballerina of her generation, she hid her problem from her teachers after leaving home at nine to go to ballet’s elite school in the French capital.”