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The tiny community of Harrold, in the far north of Texas, has recently approved a local decision to allow it’s teachers to bring firearms to school to protect against possible shootings.

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An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, which is about the child-bride of Muhammad. A spokesman for the prize said Random House’s decision not to print Jones’s novel represented “a threat to all literature”.

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This is Matthew Syed on Sex and the Olympic City:

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses – there to assist the athletes – in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes – literally thousands of them – strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

Hage, now 44, started working as a novelist relatively late, having trained as a photographer. “Someone told me I should be writing,” he says, after which he started writing a short story. “It kept enlarging, until I realised it had to be a novel.”
The novel draws on his own experience as a child in Beirut during the civil war. “But it’s also a work of fiction, and it has universal themes. Many people who have lived in conflict zones respond to the story.” Hage wrote De Niro’s Game in English, but grew up speaking Arabic and French. It was only as an 18-year-old international student that he began to read English, since when he has spent time living in New York and his current home in Canada.

I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

and later

While the Arabs regard Israelis as latter-day Crusaders, an extension of the white, colonizing Europe, many Israelis, for their part, regard the Arabs as the new incarnation of our past oppressors, pogrom makers and Nazis.
This situation charges Europe with a particular responsibility for the solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict: Instead of wagging their fingers at either side, Europeans should extend empathy, understanding and help to both sides. You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel and being pro-Palestine. You have to be pro-peace.
The woman in the window might be a Palestinian woman in Nablus. She might be a Jewish Israeli woman in Tel Aviv. If you want to help make peace between these two women in the two windows, you had better read more about them.
Read novels, dear friends. They will tell you much.

This is one example of his work:

The ancient lament
The tree to which you stretched out
your little hand,
the green pomegranate
with its beautiful vermilion flowers,

in the silent lonely garden
all the gold is turning green again
and June is restoring it
with light and heat.

You, flower of my
beaten and withered plant,
you, of my useless life
the last, unique flower,

you are in the cold earth,
you are in the black earth;
the sun will not liven you again
nor love awaken you.

–Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907)

Borrowed from Consolation

Sienkiewicz was born in Poland in 1846 and raised during the country’s partitions. He was a constant fighter for his nation’s independence but died a couple of years before that event took place.

In his presentation speech, Carl David af Wirsén commented:

If one surveys Sienkiewicz’ achievement it appears gigantic and vast, and at every point noble and controlled. As for his epic style, it is of absolute artistic perfection. That epic style with its powerful over-all effect and the relative independence of episodes is distinguished by naive and striking metaphors. In this respect, as Geijer has remarked, Homer is the master because he perceives grandeur in simplicity as, for example, when he compares the warriors to flies that swarm around a pail of milk, or when Patroklos, who all in tears asks Achilles to let him fight against the enemies, is compared to a little girl who weeping clings to the dress of her mother and wants to be taken in her arms. A Swedish critic has noticed in Sienkiewicz some similes that have the clarity of Homeric images. Thus the retreat of an army is compared to a retreating wave that leaves mussels and shells on the beach, or the beginning of gunfire is compared to the barking of a village dog who is soon joined in chorus by all the other dogs. The examples could be multiplied. The attack on the front and rear of an army surrounded and subject to fire from both sides is compared to a field that is reaped by two groups of mowers who begin their work at opposite sides of the field with the purpose of meeting in the middle. In Krzyzacy the Samogites rising from furrows attack the German knights like a swarm of wasps whose nest has been damaged by a careless wanderer. In Pan Wolodyjowski we also find admirable images; in order to judge them we should remember that, as often in Homer, the two terms of the comparison converge only in one point, while the rest remains vague. Wolodyjowski with his unique sword kills human lives around him as rapidly as a choir boy after the mass snuffs the candles on the altar one after the other with his long extinguisher.

The Nobel committee, however, didn’t come knocking at all. Instead, they gave their 1903 prize in literature to the Norwegian poet Björnstjerne Björnson.

One of your favourite writers, right?

Why didn’t Ibsen get it? He was constantly rejected, apparently, because his writings were too realistic and did not contain any idealism.

In the previous year Leo Tolstoy had been considered and rejected for the prize. Tolstoy claimed that he didn’t mind, because, in his words, it saved me from the painful necessity of dealing in some way with money.

The Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Committee during the early years, was Carl David af Wirsén, “the Don Quixote of Swedish romantic idealism,” and it was he who was bitterly opposed to Tolstoy’s political views, and, presumably, to those of Ibsen.

The IGnobel is the title which Hemingway, the 1954 recipient, bestowed on the prize.