The annual Jaipur Literature festival begins on Friday amidst expectations of nearly 2 lakh visitors at the historic Diggi palace in the city. The gathering this time will see the likes of several Nobel prize winners, Booker prize winners. The big faces who will grace the occasion will be Jonathan Franzen, Amartya Sen, Jhumpa Lahiri and Gloria Steinem among others. Read more
Kent University was right – the best children’s books are better written, but only adult literature confronts the range of human experience, says Jonathan Myerson: The Guardian
Come on, University of Kent, why the grovelling retreat? Your creative writing website got it right first time. You know perfectly well that when you made a distinction between “great literature” and “mass-market thrillers or children’s fiction”, you were standing up for something. That Keats is different from Dylan, or, in this instance, that Philip Roth does say something rather more challenging than JK Rowling, that Jonathan Franzen does create storylines more ambiguous and questioning than Stephanie Meyer’s. What’s so wrong with that? I’ll go forward carrying the banner even if you won’t. Read more
American novelist Jonathan Franzen will be attending next year’s Jaipur Literature Festival, India’s best known literary event.
According to a tweet by William Dalrymple, one of the festival’s directors, Franzen has already accepted the invitation to attend the event.
The 2014 DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, Asia-Pacific’s largest literary festival, will be for 5 days from 17-21 January in Jaipur, India.
Franzen, one of America’s most well-known novelists, has recently been in news for his forthcoming book, The Kraus Project, Franzen’s translation of the work of Austrian essayist Karl Kraus, who looked with dismay upon the Europe of his day.
In an essay published this afternoon on the website of The Guardian, titled “What’s Wrong With the Modern World,” Franzen launches into a lengthy diatribe against contemporary American life.
Jonathan Franzen meditates on marriage and mobiles in these largely brilliant essays.
I’d heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run. Read more…
