Amsterdam: The Making of a City 1980 - today by Marcel van Engelen Amsterdam in the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed to have lost its way. Scarred by decay, addiction, and widespread squatting, the city faced rising unemployment, an exodus of residents, and offices abandoning the historic center. Few [...]
by Lynn Minnesota madness: authors (and habits) from the prairie If you've been watching the courageous, caring people of Minnesota these past weeks, you might enjoy a peek into the local character, as evidenced by the writers from there. Not to forget Little House on the Prairie, Minnesota's character is still [...]
In Orbital, six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through [...]
by Sophie It's May, and that means a trio of big literary prizes has been announced! First off, the International Booker Prize was awarded this past Tuesday. Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq was the winner. These 12 stories were translated into English from Kannada (a language spoken in South India) by [...]
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due Winner of the 2024 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and Winner of the 2024 Shirley Jackson Award for Novel. A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a [...]
by Sophie Last year I wrote about reading along with the 2023 Ursula K. le Guin Prize shortlist. Reading along has become something of an annual literary pilgrimage for me since the prize's inception in 2022, so I'm writing about it again (and again as long as the ABC Blog will [...]
by Sophie Congratulations to Han Kang, who is this year's Nobel Prize laureate for the Literature category! We all probably know her from her International Booker Prize winning The Vegetarian, and thankfully since then quite a few of her other works have been translated into English as well. The Nobel Prize [...]
by Sophie If you've ever seen my Staff Choice list, or any of my recent Top 5s, you'll know I'm a huge Ursula K. Le Guin stan. There's just something about her fantasy and her social science fiction stories that connects very deeply and immediately to my being, and the older [...]
by Lauren Norwegian author, poet and playwright Jon Fosse has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy called his "innovative plays and prose which gives voice to the unsayable." The 64-year-old's major works, written in the Nynorsk variation of Norwegian, include the Septology [...]
by Bella It’s that time of the year again: the winners of the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes for achievements in literature were recently announced! Let’s take a look. Fiction The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in The History of a Very [...]
