Thursday, August 30, 2007

Literary news: Glad and sad

Cormac McCarthy won the U.K."s James Tait Black memorial prize for The Road. The Guardian article indicates, too, that he is being mentioned as a Nobel contender. I'd like to see that -- it would be very well-deserved for his entire body of work, which is impressive, to say the least.

I also read the obituary for literary scholar Julia Briggs, who was only in her 60s and died of a brain tumor. I read her study of Virginia Woolf and loved it. She was married to the historian Robin Briggs, which I did not know. It's very tragic. When one of your favorite writers dies, it is a loss -- even though you don't know them personally, you feel you know them just a little through their work; and of course, you do lose the gift of the writing that they would have done.

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