By Marije Huging In March, the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the UK’s most prestigious book award for women writers, for which the winner gets 30 000 pounds, was released. The drama that ensued earlier this month regarding the prize has something larger to say about literary prize culture, and it’s entering into…
The Poetics of Prose
By Lua Valino de Jong The following is a review of two literary pieces, Autobiography of Red (1998) and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Even though it is not necessary to have read these to grasp what is written here, I would recommend doing so, as these genre-transcending works speak for themselves. The recent…
‘Unnamed’ & Deep into the Green
‘Unnamed’ By Fenna Capelle Time may brag, for she transcends the ages Refuge lean on angels enclosing her Bounty can rest in taking her wages Tempt resilience, she’ll refuse to stir They fought with reason and conquered it all And have laid siege on love and fantasy, That dare not think of a thing so…
A Millennial’s Struggle to Read
by Alice Fournier “In a secular age,” writes Ceridwen Dovey in a The NewYorker article, “I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence.” The article, published in the newspaper’s section ‘Cultural Comments’ and titled, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” had me wondering this exact same question. I don’t remember…
How The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Destroyed Our Expectations
By Joëlle Koorneef If you have ever watched any movie starring Zooey Deschanel, you might be familiar with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She is the ukulele strumming beauty who rollerskates into the life of a poor sad boy to charm him with her pastel hair and deep dark history. She is typically the love…
The World of Kazuo Ishiguro: 2017 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
By Gloria Borroni The literary world is divided into two groups, fans who gather together in trepidation to discover whether their favorite writer won the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature, and people who disregard the award completely. Kazuo Ishiguro received the award for 2017. The Swedish Academy decided to give the prize to Ishiguro, because,…
An Hour or Two for Raymond Carver
Days that have you short on inspiration are days when nothing seems so worthwhile as sauntering over to the Zeeuwse Bibliotheek and hiding between the pages of a book. If, by chance, you are a reader who finds solace in sinister fiction, you would do good in picking up a book by American short fiction…
Degrees of literality
Proposal for a 5-degree indexation for the literality of written text With the rise of digital communication, most notably that via textual conversation, comes an increased uncertainty surrounding the nuanced interpretation of written text. One of the particular sources of unclarity that is exacerbated in digital communication in comparison to direct conversation, is the matter of literality….