Literature

Surely it is a coincidence that soon after the critic James Wood left The New Republic for The New Yorker and published a book called "How Fiction Works," his former editor Leon Wieseltier dismissed modern book reviewing as largely a treatment of whether a book "works"or not. This is Wieseltier's dig at the vast Master's of Fine Arts industry, where student writers meet to workshop each other's manuscripts, which leads presumably to controversies not...

A new photo exhibit at the University of New Hampshire highlights horses from mythology, literature and closer to home. The university's Dimond Library and the UNH Equine Center have teamed up to present "The Literary Horse: When Legends Come to Life," which will be on display June 1 - 23. The exhibit pairs photos of horses and riders with quotations from books ranging from Don Quixote to The Arabian Nights. The photos showcase everything from carriage driving to show jumping, and include images from UNH and other regional equestrian programs.

A new photo exhibit at the University of New Hampshire highlights horses from mythology, literature and closer to home. The university's Dimond Library and the UNH Equine Center have teamed up to present "The Literary Horse: When Legends Come to Life," which will be on display June 1 - 23. The exhibit pairs photos of horses and riders with quotations from books ranging from Don Quixote to The Arabian Nights. The photos showcase everything from carriage driving to show jumping, and include images from UNH and other regional equestrian programs.

Well-wrought fiction can turn readers into mind readers, via characters on the page. In academic essays and books, Dorrit Cohn meticulously showed how some of the world's most enduring authors performed such magic. "In this wonderfully subtle way, it's almost a sleight of hand," said Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University and one of Dr. Cohn's longtime friends. "She understood at a deep level how authors do this, how authors get us inside the minds of characters and show us what they are thinking, and how minds work.

STOCKHOLM - A surprising number of bettors correctly chose French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio to win the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, leading the award jury to suspect a leak. The annual literature prize selection by the Swedish Academy is notoriously hard to guess, but the betting firm Ladbrokes received a large number of bets on Le Clezio in the days before Thursday's announcement. "I have a strong suspicion that there has been a leak in the system this time," Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said yesterday.

CAIRO -- Renowned Iraqi poet Nazek al-Malaika, who was famous as the first to write Arabic poetry in free verse rather than classical rhyme, died here Wednesday. She was 85. Ms. Malaika died of old age at a hospital in the Egyptian capital, where she had lived in self- imposed exile since 1990, said Nizar Marjan, the Iraqi consul here. Born in Baghdad in 1922 to a mother who was also a poet and a father who was a teacher, Ms. Malaika discovered a love for literature early in life, writing her first poem at the age of 10. She graduated in 1944 from...

Well-wrought fiction can turn readers into mind readers, via characters on the page. In academic essays and books, Dorrit Cohn meticulously showed how some of the world's most enduring authors performed such magic. "In this wonderfully subtle way, it's almost a sleight of hand," said Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University and one of Dr. Cohn's longtime friends. "She understood at a deep level how authors do this, how authors get us inside the minds of characters and show us what they are...

Talk about home-court advantage. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in Stockholm yesterday, and the Swedish Academy gave it to Tomas Tranströmer, an elderly Swedish poet virtually unknown outside his homeland. The selection dashed hopes — raised by a flurry of last-minute speculation among Internet odds-makers — that this year's prize would go to Bob Dylan instead. Dylan would have been an inspired choice for the world's most prestigious literary prize, albeit controversial to purists.

Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point By Elizabeth D. SametFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 259 pp., $23 I began this account of teaching literature at West Point with curiosity because reading poetry and preparing for war seemed like utterly contradictory enterprises. And I finished the book with gratitude because here was an original, unique, and humane point of view I had seldom encountered. Elizabeth Samet, educated at Harvard and Yale, has taught literature to cadets at West Point since 1997, before 9/11 and the start of the war in Iraq and since.

Avenue Q is, in one way or another, the street where we all live. That's the premise of the 2004 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical inspired by "Sesame Street. " True, we didn't all graduate from college with a bachelor's degree in English literature, move to a New York City apartment building where Gary Coleman is the superintendent, and get downsized out of our jobs before we could even start work — which is what happens to young Princeton at the outset of "Avenue Q. " But we can all relate to a story about hard economic times and difficult personal relationships.

Once when his teenage daughter was sick and staying home, Irvin Stock sat with her, discussing Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" well into the night. Russian novelists were a favorite of Dr. Stock's, and he would read passages from their work in his animated, deep voice. "He wanted to know: What did it tell you about the human condition and meaning," said his daughter Laura of Berkeley, Calif. Dr. Stock, a former chairman of the English department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, died Jan. 30 in his Brookline home from complications of kidney...

Esi Edugyan has won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards for a novel about a group of black jazz musicians trying to survive in Europe during World War II. Edugyan won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her book "Half-Blood Blues" on Tuesday. She thanked her father, Kweku, an immigrant from Ghana who brought his family to Canada in the 1970s. The five others on the short list included one by Michael Ondaatje. "Half-Blood Blues" also landed on the short list for the Man Booker Prize.

Longtime book agent and editor Ira Silverberg has been named director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA announced Friday that Silverberg will begin his new job Dec. 5. His responsibilities will include overseeing the awarding of grants and fellowships to people and institutions and coordinating the NEA's nationwide reading programs. Silverberg's clients have included memoir writer Ishmael Beah and National Book Award fiction finalist Adam Haslett.

Talk about home-court advantage. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in Stockholm yesterday, and the Swedish Academy gave it to Tomas Tranströmer, an elderly Swedish poet virtually unknown outside his homeland. The selection dashed hopes — raised by a flurry of last-minute speculation among Internet odds-makers — that this year's prize would go to Bob Dylan instead. Dylan would have been an inspired choice for the world's most prestigious literary prize, albeit controversial to purists.

The Swedish Academy says it will announce the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. The secretive literature panel is by tradition the last of the prize-awarding institutions to set a date for the announcement. Last year's 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) literature prize went to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The Nobel Prize announcements start Monday with the medicine award, followed by physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences next Monday,...

Dr. Milton R. Stern, a retired English professor at the University of Connecticut and a respected Herman Melville scholar, died of complications of a stroke July 26 at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham. He was 82. Colleagues and family said he will be best remembered as an ardent advocate of public education and of the understanding that literature can be a means to personal and community transformation. "He was an extraordinary scholar and friend," said Ruth Prigozy, executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.

M ost of us don't go around obsessing about the Seven Deadly Sins — most of us probably couldn't name them — but the transgressions defined during early Christian times still cross our consciousness on a regular basis. Who hasn't worried about eating too much, or been distressed by someone else's anger. Turns out, these "sins" are often the subjects of scientific study, albeit indirectly. Researchers gathered at the MIT Museum last month to describe work they've conducted relevant to the deadly seven, as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

Clinical outreach worker Ann Mutharia hears the stories all the time: the man with diabetes who couldn't afford his copayment and had stopped taking his insulin; the deaf man who needed medical attention as well as food stamps and fuel assistance but wasn't able to get through to overwhelmed social service agencies. Mutharia, 36, a licensed practical nurse, is a part of a pilot program at Medford-based Network Health to prevent its members from developing chronic conditions by connecting them with health care services.

Vera Lee of Newton, a Boston College Romance languages and literatures professor emerita, never had much interest in science fiction or fantasy, but she trusted her daughter’s enthusiastic recommendation enough to begin reading “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.’’ She said she “got hooked immediately’’ and ended up reading the seven-book series twice. Not wanting to leave the Potter world, she wrote a book explaining what makes it so compelling. “On the Trail of Harry Potter’’ is a comprehensive study of J.K. Rowling’s magical world that has...

THE ICONIC status of the “Twenty-five Books That Shaped America,’’ a new collection of essays by Thomas C. Foster, is evident in his subtitle: “How White Whales, Green Lights, and Restless Spirits Forged Our National Identity.’’ Like Dylan or Madonna, “Moby Dick’’ and “The Great Gatsby’’ need only a hint to be instantly recognizable to most Americans. With the patriotic bunting on the porch this weekend - and with the summer reading list beckoning - it’s intriguing to consider the American character through the prism of our national...