Tag: Culture
Stephen King attacks Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize knockers
Guitar-playing horror legend speaks out against literary authors such as Gary Shteyngart and Irvine Welsh who have scorned the singer’s award. Stephen King has come to the defence of Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize for literature, accusing those who oppose the award of sour grapes. According to King, no other musician has had such an impact […]
First edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia set to fetch $1m at auction
Rare European copy of key mathematics text is going under hammer at Christies in New York with record guide price. A first edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica could become the most expensive print sold of the revolutionary text when it goes under the hammer with a guide price of at least $1m (790,000) […]
Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘Were coming close to the point where we can create people who are superior to others’
Social changes unleashed by new technologies could undermine core human values unless we engage with science, warns author. Imagine a two-tiered society with elite citizens, genetically engineered to be smarter, healthier and to live longer, and an underclass of biologically run-of-the-mill humans. It sounds like the plot of a dystopian novel, but the world could […]
Bad sex award goes to Italian novelist Erri De Luca’s genital ‘ballet dancers’
The Literary Reviews annual pillory of overheated erotic writing selects a passage from The Day Before Happiness for high-profile ridicule. Italian author, poet and translator Erri De Luca has added another accolade to his glittering career although this may be one he would prefer to have avoided. The winner of the 2013 European Prize for […]
Thom Jones: the writer who explored madness, art and violence
The writer, who died this week aged 71, began his career late in his tumultuous life, exploding onto the literary scene with his Vietnam story The Pugilist at Rest. Thom Jones, the Illinois-born short-story writer who has died, aged 71, of complications from diabetes, rocketed onto the literary scene in 1991, when the New Yorker […]