None other than Alain de Botton will be a guest curator at the newly-reopened Rijksmuseum next year.
- Awards! Tommy Wieringa’s Caesarion has been nominated for this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This is a truly international award as it recognizes fiction translated into English as well – in fact, a quarter of the prize money for a translated book goes to the translater, how cool is that?
Gerbrand Bakker won it in 2009 for The Twin. Caesarion is translated by Sam Garrett, who also translated Herman Koch’s much-discussed The Dinner. John Green’s Dutch translation of The Fault in Our Stars won both the public vote as well as the jury vote in the Dutch-Flemish prize Dioraphte Jongerenliteratuur Prijs 2013.
- Awards II! The shortlist for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) was announced this week, and can be found here. The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, but they’ll be getting their own post here next.
Interview! But with himself! On the eve of the publication of John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, he reminisces on the impact of his first, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The Huffington Post also features a beautiful animation of a 1996 David Foster Wallace interview.
- The unexplored future of digital books. Yes, I say – even though I’m an old-fashioned paper books kind of girl. On a related note, Neil Gaiman’s London Book Fair speech, urging publishers to make mistakes and experiment. The NY Times also looks at the future of publishing, highlighting established authors choosing to self-publish.
- Start saving now, Ulysses fans: a special “The Works of Master Poldy” is to be released this year in celebration of Bloomsday.
- Lists! GQ devised a new Canon: 21 Books from the 21st Century Every Man Should Read. I’ve only read 2, but then, I’m not a man.
Flavorwire goes meta with Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry. They also have a slideshow where you can virtually visit famous literary salons.
- Granta’s “20 under 40″ list has been announced (see a pic of the class of 1983 in our previous Bookbits).
- And finally, booksellers, from all angles. We do like to think this is what we do, although sadly/thankfully* not quite so half-dressed. (*cross out whatever is inapplicable here)
Many thanks to Tom, Rick, Jitse, PeterL and Sigrid for several of the above links! If you have any book-related news links you want to share, mail blog@abc.nl.
