‘Far From The Tree’: NPR Interviews Author Andrew Solomon
Author: Paige Cohen
November 16, 2012
NPR interviews author Andrew Solomon about his recent book Far From The Tree, which “explores what it’s like for parents of children who are profoundly different or likely to be stigmatized—children with down syndrome, deafness, autism, dwarfism, or who are prodigies, become criminals, or are conceived in rape.”
Solomon, a National Book Award-winning writer and finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, tells interviewer Terry Gross:
… I had been somewhat unforgiving of my family of being a little slow — not very slow, but a little slow — to accept the fact that I was gay. And when I started looking at all these families, I thought, ‘loving someone and accepting someone are two different things…
Listen to the entire story here. [NPR]
This American Life Releases ‘The Invisible Made Visible’
Just yesterday, This American Life released ‘The Invisible Made Visible’—a video of live performances by Tig Notaro, Mike Bibiglia, David Sedaris, and David Rankoff recorded in the spring of 2012. According to curator Ira Glass, the artists’ stories were filmed specifically because they are “too visual to ever be on the radio.”
In Rankoff’s story—his last story on the show—he discusses his battle with cancer and then “gracefully, beautifully, does a solo dance onstage.” Learn more and check out the trailer here. [Out]
Horror: a genre doomed to literary Hell?
Literary writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon increasingly deploy tropes and images from genre, while genre writers have upped their stakes considerably in terms of complexity, moral resonance and style.
In this engaging article, the Guardian raises the question: With sci-fi and fantasy writers upping the ante, why does horror—“the third aspect of ‘speculative fiction’”—remain a struggling genre?
Read more here.
Awards Awards Awards
A congratulations goes out to all of this year’s National Book Award winners:
Louise Erdrich (The Round House, Fiction)
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Non-Fiction)
David Ferry (Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, Poetry)
William Alexander (Goblin Secret, Young People’s Literature)
And, of course—while we’re honoring outstanding contributions to the literary community—let us not forget both Elmore Leonard and Arthur O. Sulzberger, winners of the 2012 Life Time Achievement Award, as well as Jeanette Winterson who recently won the Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize for her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
