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The Middle East is still at the center of the US media and public argument, especially after the US engagement in the most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ben Fountain addresses American involvement in these wars in his novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012). His work received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. This paper examines Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk vis-à-vis grievability of American and non-American lives in the context of the 2003 Iraq War. It aims at uncovering the differential methods implemented by the author to approach the casualties in Iraq and how he addresses accountability for war atrocities. It draws on Judith Butler's contention that Western societies treat the lives/deaths of non-Western people in a differential method; the lives of Westerners are prioritized at the expense of the safety and wellness of non-Westerners. The argument is made in three constructs: grievable lives, ungrievable lives, and accountability and culpability in war. This article argues that Fountain's novel is largely centered on American soldiers' victim status and their extended suffering. Americans' deaths are grieved through a large narrative space while Iraqis' deaths are disregarded and ungrieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Lowell's Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as "Man and Wife", "Waking in the Blue", and "Home After Three Months Away". Lowell's hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and "divine madness" lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung's individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one's own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell's Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longer novels on shortlists are significantly more likely to win literary awards. This relationship is shown using all shortlisted novels for three prestigious prizes—the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award for Fiction, over the time period 1963–2021. The result is robust to controlling for author gender and Goodreads rating, and to whether one uses absolute length (in pages) or relative length on the shortlist. The size of the effect suggests other valid cues are underweighted in the process of selecting a winner. Judgment and decision-making research suggests several causes of the apparent bias. One is the representativeness heuristic: longer novels resemble the tomes that constitute the foundations of the Western canon, and this similarity may subconsciously sway judges. Other explanations include an effort heuristic and the effects of accountability on decisions. These results may explain previous findings that Booker Prize winners are not higher quality than shortlisted novels. The findings cast doubt on the validity of awards as signals of literary merit and have broader implications for the inferred quality of expert judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alan Dugan was a contemporary American poet. His last volume, entitled Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, was published in 2001 and won Dugan a second National Book Award. This paper is based on Alan Dugan’s narration of animals in his new poems and Dugan’snarration of animals, which conveys his profound thinking and care about human beings and the life form of existence. “Human beings” are often closely related to animals. The animal narration in Dugan’s literary works expresses a hidden human world “behind his back.” Therefore, “animals” is one of the keys to interpreting Dugan’s complex, mysterious, and bizarre narrative world. The expression and writing of animals can be used as a breakthrough point of Dugan’s research so as to dig deeply into his spiritual world and artistic characteristics in order to achieve a new understanding and thinking of his literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary life-writing, especially of an experimental disposition, increasingly demonstrates its wariness of narrative as an organising principle of auto/biography and favours structures that resemble an archive – a repository of autobiographical content, disconnected, fragmentary, and arbitrarily arranged. Over the last two decades, we can observe a rise in the popularity of self-archives adopting alphabetical structures such as the bibliography, the encyclopaedia, the glossary, and the index. Of all the alphabetical arrangements of the archive, the index appears the least likely form to be used in life-writing because of the rigidity of its structure and its aura of formality and academic detachment. However, as this article demonstrates, the index can be successfully used in life-writing as a method of processing and investigating one's past. The article begins with a theoretical discussion of the index – its historical and cultural significance, as well as its politics and poetics. It proceeds to analyse two notable uses of the index for autobiographical purposes: Alejandro Cesarco's long-term artistic project titled Index (2000–2015) and Joan Wickersham's memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (2008), a National Book Award's finalist for non-fiction. The article shows that whereas Cesarco employs the index primarily to catalogue and examine his intellectual and artistic influences, Wickersham uses it as a structural foundation for her personal search to comprehend and mourn the suicide of her father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does anyone write poetry? Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) was a poet, author, and translator with a long and much-decorated career. She and her family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to the United States, where she would establish herself as a writer. The poem "When I Am Asked" describes the beginning of her journey into poetry, undertaken during a period of grief after the death of her mother. Her writing would come to include nine collections of poetry and myriad accolades, including the 1981 National Book Award and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Though her ouvre is filled with evocative works, this piece stands out as particularly relevant to physicians and other writers who find solace by expressing themselves through the art of poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the diverse news updates from late 2021 to early 2024. Topics discussed include Ed McClanahan's literary legacy and personal connections, the publication of Frank X Walker's A Is for Affrilachia, and environmental and local news events such as chemical dumping and a bear attack.

The article is an interview with Edward P. Jones, a renowned author known for his short stories and novel. Jones discusses his upbringing in Washington, D.C., his journey to becoming a writer, and the themes in his works. He emphasizes the importance of character development and the impact of personal experiences on his writing. Jones also touches on the role of literature in changing individual insight and the process of crafting his prose. The interview sheds light on Jones's perspective on writing and the surprises that come with literary success. [Extracted from the article]

Ibram X. Kendi's bestselling book How to be an Antiracist (2019) has been enormously influential and deserves the serious attention it has received. It follows his important historical work Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), which is much more scholarly and won the National Book Award the year it came out. But these books seem to take for granted a fairly simple version of cultural relativism in ethics that is widely regarded by moral philosophers as seriously defective. I want to take these doubts further and show that cultural relativism is a disastrous theoretical choice for an anti-racist like Kendi to make. In Section I I explain the kind of relativism I have in mind: agent-based, cultural, normative ethical relativism. In Section II, using the two books I have mentioned, I give textual support to my attribution of this kind of relativism to Kendi. In Section III I argue for my theoretical-disaster claim and defend it against some Kendi-inspired criticism. In Section IV I address some serious relativist doubts about ethical universalism, the opposite of relativism. Finally, in Section V I offer some brief concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originally from the Gulf Coast community of DeLisle, Mississippi, Jesmyn Ward is unapologetically steeped in a southern Black literary tradition that amplifies the complicated realities of being Black in the South. Ward is a MacArthur Fellow and two-time National Book Award winner for her novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She writes across a variety of genres, including fiction, essays, and a memoir, Men We Reaped (2013). In an interview with Regina N. Bradley ahead of the release of her novel Let Us Descend (2023), Ward discussed the importance of the Gothic in writing about the Black South, how grief is central to her writing, and why writing helps her confront and understand Mississippi's racially turbulent history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of collaboration in the field of translation and challenges the notion of individual authorship and originality. The author reflects on their own experiences as a translator and the need to justify collaborative work in a field that values single-authored works. They argue that translators are often marginalized and undervalued due to the perception that their work is imitative and derivative. The article calls for a redefinition of the artist and the recognition of collaboration as a transformative act that challenges hierarchical relationships and traditional notions of creativity. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Iş, Güç: The Journal of Industrial Relations & Human Resources is the property of Is, Guc: The Journal of Industrial Relations & Human Resources and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Norwegian author Jon Fosse has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023. Fosse is known for his innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unsayable. His works have been translated into around fifty languages and his plays have been staged worldwide. Fosse's writing is influenced by his upbringing in the Hardanger region of Norway, with its beautiful landscape and the sound of the dialect spoken there. He cites philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as poet Georg Trakl, as important influences on his writing. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

John Irving a distinguished American novelist and short-story writer who established his reputation with one of his renowned novels The World According to Garp (1978); film (1982). He was born in March 2, 1942, Exeter, New Hampshire, U.S, As is characteristic of his other works, it is noted for its engaging story line, colourful characterizations, macabre humour, and examination of contemporary issues. Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968). The novel was reasonably well reviewed and gained a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. Internationally renowned, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language. The Cider House Rules is essentially about moral values, ethnicity and abortions of women's right to have them. It is impossible to miss Irving's message, but his method of conveying it is ingenious in the extreme….Irving's mastery of plot and pacing has never been more engagingly on display. Yet the restrictions imposed by these skills are also evident. In the world according to Irving, characters are the passive victims of life. They are either children or childlike, dependent on forces beyond their control. They "wait and see' (an ongoing refrain in this novel), wondering, like Homer and Dr. Larch, "What is going to happen to me?" What literally happen to them, of course, are the tricks, sometimes macabre, visited upon them by their creator (23). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nelson Algren, a writer from Chicago, is often overlooked in literary education. However, his novel Never Come Morning had a profound impact on the author of this article, prompting them to explore Algren's other works. Algren's writing delves into the lives of marginalized individuals in Chicago, capturing their struggles and flaws with empathy and dignity. His work raises important questions about society's treatment of its most vulnerable members. Despite falling from prominence in the 1950s due to blacklisting, Algren's contributions to literature are significant and thought-provoking. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the controversy surrounding the authorized biography of Philip Roth by Blake Bailey, which was initially praised but later faced accusations of sexual assault against the author. The biography was taken out of print, but later picked up by Skyhorse Publishing. The article also mentions Ira Nadel's biography of Roth, which was published around the same time as Bailey's book. Nadel's biography is seen as a potential replacement for Bailey's due to the controversy surrounding the latter. The article highlights the complex and contradictory aspects of Roth's life and work, including his relationships, marriages, and literary achievements. It also explores Roth's feelings of betrayal and anger, particularly in relation to his psychoanalyst. The article concludes by suggesting that biographies may not fully capture the complexity of a person's life and that our understanding of individuals will always be slightly wrong. [Extracted from the article]

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of anti-Black racism, public policy, radical politics and social movements. She has written three award-winning books, including Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), which was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. In 2021, Taylor was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]