Was Speaking At University Of Illinois When Award Was Announced
“New Jersey native Peter Balakian has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry,” NJ.com notes.
“Balakian, 65, who grew up in Teaneck and Tenafly, wins for Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), a book of poems that the Pulitzer board says “bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.”
“The book’s title poem centers on Balakian’s experience excavating bones of victims of the Armenian genocide with a TV crew and weaves in other parts of his life.”
Tom Williams, whose book Among the Wild Mulattos was named one of the best of 2015 by National Public Radio, will read from his work at 5 p.m. Monday, April 18, in Roosevelt University’s seventh floor Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue.
“You could call him an author to watch, but he’s really a writer we should have been watching a long time ago,” said NPR’s Michael Schaub, who defined Williams as “an uncompromising writer with a fiercely original voice . . . (who) questions the idea of human uniqueness.”
His most recent work, a short story collection titled Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales, was published in 2015 by Texas Review Press and has since put him on the map as one of today’s promising writers.
By The Society of Midland Authors with The Beachwood Added Value Affairs Desk
The Society of Midland Authors will present its annual awards May 10 in Chicago, honoring its choices for the best books by Midwest authors published in 2015: ADULT NONFICTION WINNER: Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, Penguin Press. (Author lives in the Chicago area.) From the New York Times:
“Soon enough,” Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, “I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo’s middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess.”
As is so often the case, what got Dreger into trouble was sex. A historian of science and medicine, she criticized a group of transgender activists who had attacked a sex researcher for his findings on why some people want to change gender. Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Dreger too. The bad news is that this was hard on Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I’ll just note they called her son a “womb turd.”) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book. Galileo’s Middle Finger is many things: a rant, a manifesto, a treasury of evocative new terms (sissyphobia, autogynephilia, phall-o-meter) and an account of the author’s transformation “from an activist going after establishment scientists into an aide-de-camp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me” – and back again.
Here’s Dreger at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education last month:
“The consequences of ghettoization provided an apparent justification for the original condition,” sociologist Mitchell Duneier writes in his new book, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea.
Or as Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes in The New York Times: “This ‘pernicious circular logic’ – using ghetto squalor, brought about by segregation and neglect, to justify more segregation and neglect – would characterize approaches to the ghetto for centuries after.”
MELBOURNE – The unprecedented leak of millions of documents – known as the Panama Papers – from tax haven law firm Mossack Fonseca prompted me to pick up an old book on my shelf. Written in 1969, Adventures in Tax Avoidance (with 120 Practical Tax Hints) by Peter Clyne presents “the adventure” of tax avoidance as a game “played by experts, locked in a perennial battle with the revenue authorities’ team of experts.”
“Geoff Harkness, assistant professor of sociology at Morningside College, recently received the 2015-2016 Midwest Sociological Society Distinguished Book Award for his book Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class,” the Sioux City Journal in Iowa reports.
“Harkness [received] the award [this month] at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting in Chicago.”
The book was published in 2014, but for some reason it’s never made it onto the Beachwood, so let’s take a look.
One of the 20th century’s most original and influential literary theorists, Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is also known as a fascinatingly atypical, polarizing public intellectual; a loud, cigar-smoking contrarian; and a lightning rod for both the political right and left. The truth and the limitations of this reputation are explored in Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible by Gary A. Olson. At once a literary biography and a traditional life story, this engrossing volume details Fish’s vibrant personal life and his remarkably versatile career.
Born into a tumultuous family, Fish survived life with an emotionally absent father and a headstrong mother through street sports and trouble-making as much as through his success at a rigorous prep school.
As Olson shows, Fish’s escape from the working-class neighborhoods of 1940s and 1950s Providence, Rhode Island, came with his departure for the university life at the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale. His meteoric rise through the academic ranks at a troubled Vietnam-era UC-Berkeley was complemented by a 1966 romp through Europe that included drag racing through the streets of Seville in his Alfa Romeo. He went on to become an internationally prominent scholar at Johns Hopkins before moving to Duke, where he built a star-studded academic department that became a key site in the culture and theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
“Twenty years ago, Donald McCloskey, a brash and brilliant economist at the University of Iowa, surprised the academic world (and his family) by transitioning to Deirdre,” The Chronicle of Higher Educationnotes.
“In a 1996 profile in The Chronicle, McCloskey is quoted as saying, ‘I expected to lose my job. I was prepared to move to Spokane and become a secretary in a grain elevator, but I didn’t have to.’
“No, she didn’t. McCloskey has continued to thrive as a scholar. The final installment of her trilogy on the Bourgeois era, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press.”
Which is interesting, but click through to read the interview – which is about writing.
“Author Irvine Welsh catapulted to fame when his first novel, Trainspotting, became a blockbuster movie in 1996 starring Ewan McGregor and directed by Danny Boyle. The gritty story chronicles the lives of a group of unemployed heroin addicts in Scotland,” WTTW reports.
“Since then, Welsh has continued to write about many of the same working-class themes and follow many of the same characters in his books. There is even a follow-up to his acclaimed film in the works.
“We’re going to shoot the sequel this year. We’re all getting back together, 20 years later” said Welsh. “Everybody’s back. The toughest part was getting myself and the screenwriter and the producer and the director together. The actors were OK. Once they realized that the background team were all kind of singing from the same song sheet, they were quite happy.”
“And while he’s been called the best storyteller in Britain, for about 10 years now he’s lived in Chicago. (Don’t miss an upcoming appearance by Welsh at the Chicago Humanities Festival on March 8.)”
From that appearance, with Jessa Crispin at the Bottom Lounge:
“A little over a decade ago, a forgotten book was suddenly remembered,” Daniel A. Gross writes for the New Yorker in “The Custodian Of Forgotten Books.”
“Its second life began when a fiction writer referenced it in a book of her own. A blogger read the new book, then tracked down a copy of the old one, and wrote about all this on his Web site. An archivist read the blog post and e-mailed it to a small publisher. By 2009, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine, first published in 1962, was back in print.
“Most novels are forgotten. Glance at the names of writers who were famous in the nineteenth century, or who won the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the twentieth, or who were on best-seller lists just a few decades ago, and chances are that most of them won’t even ring a bell. When The Moonflower Vine resurfaced and ricocheted around the publishing world, it became an unlikely exception.
