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

Oh yeah and I (more recently) enjoyed the poems of Tomas Tranströmer too. Must've lucked out w the translator, whose name I forget (this was in the New Yorker).

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
7/2
Haruki Murakami
9/2
Svetlana Aleksijevitj
6/1
Adonis
10/1
Ismail Kadare
10/1
Patrick Modiano
10/1
Jon Fosse
12/1
Philip Roth
12/1
Peter Handke
12/1
Assia Djebar
14/1
Peter Nadas
14/1
Joyce Carol Oates
16/1
Adam Zagajewski
20/1
Nawal El Saadawi
20/1
Milan Kundera
25/1
Mircea Cartarescu
25/1
Thomas Pynchon
25/1
Cees Nooteboom
25/1
Bob Dylan
25/1
Les Murray
25/1
Bei Dao
25/1
Ko Un
33/1
Umberto Eco
33/1
Nuruddin Farah
33/1
Darcia Maraini
33/1
Margaret Atwood
33/1
Don DeLillo
33/1
Amos Oz
33/1
Antonio Lobo Antunes
33/1
Richard Ford
33/1
Don Paterson
33/1
Karl Ove Knausgard
33/1
Paul Muldoon
33/1
Karel Schoeman
33/1
Juan Goytisolo
33/1
Salman Rushdie
50/1
Javier Marias
50/1
Cormac McCarthy
50/1
William Trevor
50/1
John Le Carre
50/1
Tom Stoppard
50/1
Colm Toibin
50/1

Go Pynchon!

That would be tiresome.

Interesting names that I would like to read and don't see any translations of:

Nawal El Saadawi
Assia Djebar
Darcia Maraini
Nuruddin Farah

an of course Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

If Murakami wins I'm punching somebody

Most overrated living "literary" writer

Would Murakami be winning mostly for the wind up bird chronicle? I've read many books by him and i think he's good but WUBC is the only one i can think of that could possibly be considered "great" or "important."

Guess I'm kind of over Murakami myself.

bob dylan should win a nobel prize. i mean, not really... but really.

treesh........

^good answer

treesh would be a more deserving winner than bob dylan

bloody over rated rubbish!

.....

kadare is such a nobel winner he might as well be given it now

fairly sure he would be given it now if he had cancer or something

Shaun Hutson or gtfo

What makes Murakami such a likely pick? He doesn't seem particularly more Nobel-ish (idealistic, oppressed) than plenty of others.

Murakami would be a populist pick. After a populist pick last year, maybe that's the way the current committee leans. Kundera at 25-1 seems like appealing odds.

the more i think about it, the more insane murakami seems a pick. his protagonists are mostly slacker everymen who get dragged into a world of sexuality and the unconscious, only to return from it mostly unchanged: a little humbler in some ways, maybe, but in a more important sense more self-assured. this is the same as judd apatow movies.

In truth, the most insane pick on that list would be Svetlana Aleksijevitj, at least from a historical standpoint. The only two solely nonfiction writers the award has ever gone to have been Winston Churchill and Theodor Mommsen (the second ever winner of the award). Would be nice to see them expand their horizons though.

awards are terrible why do we do this to ourselves

xp to myself, wind up bird chronicle is the same as this in every respect but integrating the stuff about the japanese occupation of china has interesting consequences. you discover that the placelessness of murakami's books, where most of the cultural reference points are american and characters all speak in the same inflectionless faux-naive manner, is a thin facade concealing a history that has been violently repressed. japanese identity is what the narrator is looking for in the well, i think, but he doesn't find it and eventually he stops looking. this solution to japan's national shame might be unsatisfying but it seems preferable to mishima's fate. although, murakami wouldn't be murakami if he was capable of the sort of un-ironic, literal commitment to an ideology that undid mishima in the end.

it's interesting to me that america hasn't had to reckon with its atrocities in the same way. i mean, in the wind up bird chronicle it seems that both the violence in nanking and the shame of the atom bombs are too traumatic to integrate into a coherent national identity. better to be global citizens. why isn't slavery like this? why aren't the atom bombs like this from our end? are we just assholes or do history's victors just never have to explain themselves?

also he goes into a well and then the book is over or something

plus he has to kill his brother-in-law in a dream in order to fulfill an oedipal fantasy that will bring his wife back to him and also kill this brother-in-law in real life.

yeah i dont really get/remember that part

treesh u are reminding me why i read so few novels

i liked when the one guy was skinned alive and then the other guy went in the well tho

they had to kill all the zoo animals by firing squad

Bob Dylan can fuck off too

bob dylans book is pretty good tbh

bob dylans book is pretty very good tbh

With (Roy Orbison), it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.

bob dylans book is pretty very good the best book that has been or will ever be written tbh

“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

i could read 10,000 pages of this kind of prose

ya he shd do another one

He sang like a professional criminal

this is the line that always made me laugh

“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

these kinds of lines are really funny to me too. his transparently disingenuous "golly gee" mode

kinda mad that Marias isn't more highly favored

in re: Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature

This man has sold a gazillion units of vinyl, CD and downloadable whatnot. It's like he hit an oil well that never stops pumping money. The committee that awards the prize kind of regards that kind of commercial success as too crass to deserve Nobel recognition. Modest plaudits among the public at large, complemented by a high esteem within academia, seems to be the best way to punch your ticket.

dude lives on a tour bus 11 months out of the year

dude could buy his own fleet of Lear jets if he wanted to

ITT -_------->>> pictures of william t vollmann (no shops allowed)

if Dylan bought a fleet of Lear jets it would bankrupt him tbrr

i don't think he should win the prize, but if the issue is him being "compromised" by corporate success i don't think it's applicable in his situation. he was destined to spend his life trying to expand the possibilities of the folk song whether it led him to fame or poverty. this is what i think based on everything i know about him.

his success seems coincidental and sort of arbitrary to the music he creates. not totally arbitrary obviously, but relatively so. much as could reasonably be expected

http://i.imgur.com/HYksNIp.png

this thread went in a great direction

now i am wondering what would happen if lagoon revealed that i was worth 180 million dollars. would ilxors resent this? would they opportunistically try to become closer to me? or, a third option, would they treat me exactly the same?

i actually sincerely think the third option is what would happen, and that is why ilx is superior to the nobel prize selection committee