Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

well not really forgotten - i've both read the book and followed the controversy last year around the plan to rename the main airport in chile after neruda - more slipped my mind when compiling this list.

kipling! by a long way the greatest eng lang writer of his day (say 1890-1915ish), very very terrible politics

if sartre was a stalinist at all he was a VERY weird stalinist (and whoever awarded it didn't IMO plough through long reaches of being and nothingness, which no one can really call well written)

i daren't even read up on gjellerup and pontoppidan

Pontoppidan was cool! Lucky Per is a masterpiece. I have no idea about Gjellerup, but he was probably a massive racist. Most Danes are.

"thomas mann: paedo who fancied his son"

He wrote about fancying boys in his diaries but he didn't actually do anything, right?

Sartre probably got the prize for his considerable literary work (Nausea, his plays, some of his stories pushing his philosophy along...a hybrid of French absurdist and his own philosophy), and then for his stance on Algeria, as far as the politics was concerned.

I was going to say Anne Carson but it turns out she's Canadian

https://medium.com/@___adn/index-of-articles-on-peter-handkes-nobel-prize-515060442ca5

This is the twitter of the person who compiled it. You get the whole deal:

This is getting better by the day:

Peter Handke was a groomsman for the Remove Kebab accordion player's wedding (aka 'Dat Face Soldier', a convicted war criminal) https://t.co/oA7VYP5T6b

— from bosnian woods (@___adn) October 13, 2019

Wow

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/14/peter-handke-nobel-prize-bosnian-genocide-conspiracy/

He wrote about fancying boys in his diaries but he didn't actually do anything, right?

I don't know anything about Mann. But quotations from André Gide (Nobel Prize 1947) available on request.

let's have a quick selection of nobel literature laureates and bad stuff about them:

https://electricliterature.com/we-need-to-talk-about-derek-walcotts-sexual-harassment-scandal/

People are giving up: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/02/nobel-prize-for-literature-hit-by-fresh-round-of-resignations

Libs are dying so this big king lib prize dying is good too

Former permanent secretary boycotts the ceremony: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/nobel-swedish-academy-peter-handke-ceremony-peter-englund-literature

Can't believe they're cheapening the prize awarded to Knut Hamsun and T. S. Eliot by giving it to an apologist of oh never mind you know

It's stupid that people keep talking about Knut Hamsun getting the prize as if he were actively supporting the Nazis when he got it. In 1920. Three years before the Beer Hall Putsch. It's not like the prize committee had a magic ball to see the future.

They should start giving it to dead people only

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk is using her prize money to set up a foundation in Poland that will support writers and translators, promote Polish culture abroad, advocate for women's and animal rights, and fight discrimination https://t.co/QXFBZ2144v

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) December 5, 2019

Soon..

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Wbgz5Gkv8C

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2020

I don"t think I have ever read her. Should rectify this.

Yup!

Lol @ the guardian forever:

"Glick, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993."

I guess autocorrect needs time. And everyone ever wants to forget Dylan won it.

Louise Glück on the terrible human responsibility of trying to grow tomatoes ❤️ pic.twitter.com/CluleyY6zy

— Cécile Varry (@CecileVarry) October 8, 2020

Love her but this seems like a very odd choice

Mircea Cărtărescu gets robbed again.

If Pynchon doesn't get it..

I've never read her either. Just clicked over to poetryfoundation.org to read a few poems - not bad!

I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes Apparently not, but will have to read more before deciding. All the reading the jury has to do, or is supposed to do---the thought of choosing one author makes my head spin, might as well use a roulette wheel. I dunno, I was okay with Dylan winning. Wondered if Sam Shepard ever would, but then he disqualified. Maybe Patti Smith someday? I mostly know her pages from when she takes them to the stage (most of those that I know are pretty good).

Thinking about the ins and outs of a group of people who, at a point very recently, decided that Kazuo Ishiguro was a good writer, rather than what he is, is a fruitless task.

The only one I've read is Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which is scruffier, funnier, shrewder than imposing title had me expecting.

This is one of my favs of hers, from Averno (2006)

Telescope

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

beautiful

Thinking about the ins and outs of a group of people who, at a point very recently, decided that Kazuo Ishiguro was a good writer, rather than what he is, is a fruitless task.

― Gerneten-flüken cake (jed_), Friday, 9 October 2020 02:05 (five hours ago) link

That was far more outrageous than Dylan winning.

Lol

https://slate.com/culture/2017/10/mike-francesa-on-nobel-winner-kazuo-ishiguro.amp?

i think ishiguro is good based on the one novel of his i've read, but i increasingly wonder if there's any point arguing about this stuff

He is fine (def not Nobel worthy to me), but you always wonder the criteria these people have.

Prizes are weird.

I like Gluck’s writing quite a bit, though yeah it is weird to highlight her over any number of her peers of similar quality

But thats awards for you

Lol just about to say That's what awards are for iirc

Thanks for "Telescope," bernard snowy.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/dario-fo-franca-rame-peoples-clowns/

Good review of a Dario Fo biog. Putting it here as he was another performer like Dylan to win the prize

In his Stanley Crouch obit Ishmael Reed mentioned that the NY literary world was aghast that Toni Morrison won the Nobel instead of Roth

It's important to note that Glück was also the judge of the Yale Younger Poets award from 2003 until quite recently. Her profile as judge, editor, and poet in mainstream letters is about as large as it can be, but I think her name comes to mind for a lot of people simply because of her profile as judge.

Going to be honest: I think her poetry sucks. But it isn't for me, and so I don't really care. Glad she won it...

Though that said, another Louise, namely Louise Erdrich, should win it, IMHO. Her and Gerald Murnane are my two picks for sometime in the next five years.

Long ago Gluck did a week of seminars at my school and seemed to talk mainly about her divorce and watching soap operas all day. I think it was my first hint that even famous poets did not live their lives in artistic transcendence

I like Louise Gluck but was surprised by her win. I had no idea she was this esteemed.

xpost I love Louise Erdrich! I really ought to read her latest, The Night Watchman. I convinced my church book club to read Future Home of the Living God with me early in the pandemic, and it was such a powerful experience to revisit Cedar and her family under these circumstances in the company of other intelligent and kind and terrified people.

Yes, she's so great, and imho, as good a stylist and storyteller as they come.