The Pittsburgh International Literary Festival, known as “LitFest,” hopes to get people talking through reading.
Hosted by the City of Asylum @ Alphabet City based on Pittsburgh’s North Side, the virtual event will feature authors from all over the world discussing topics that encompass Black, Indigenous and all people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community and the politics of publishing.
Abby Lembersky, director of programs for City of Asylum @ Alphabet City, said planning’s been underway since January. This isn’t the only online happening but it is the first 10-day festival the organization done.
It will be held May 12-18 on the organization’s virtual programming channel.
Book: ‘Sea Loves Me: Selected Stories’ by Mia Couto – Editor’s Note
Posted on 04 May 2021.
Known internationally for his novels, Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto’s career, this collection displays the Mozambican author’s inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection―from early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; to magical tales of rural Africa; to contemporary fables of the fluidity of race and gender, environmental disaster, and the clash between the countryside and the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto’s best works but never before available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads unexpectedly to love.
Photograph by David Levenson/Getty Images
Marilyn Booth ’77 is one of the world’s most prolific translators of Arabic fiction into English. For nearly four decades, she has collaborated with writers from across the Arabic-speaking world to introduce dozens of literary works from cultures that many English-speakers otherwise see represented only by foreign correspondents. Recently, Booth translated Omani writer Jokha Alharthi’s
Celestial Bodies, which nimbly narrates a set of unhappy marriages; the translation earned praise in
The New Yorker from James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism: “A beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker.”
Kissing Jessica Stein¸ and Richard Kelly’s
Donnie Darko. Nobody ever walked out of these movies, except to pee and then hurry back. I don’t remember much about Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s
Baise-Moi (usually translated as
Fuck Me or sometimes
Rape Me), except that a bunch of people walked out of it. A bunch meaning there were only a half dozen people left in a theater of about 30. It was subsequently banned in France for almost 30 years.
Punk girls know some things about sex and violence. Mainly: that sex and violence are found together as often as peanut butter and jelly, and that the entire planet is conspiring to keep girls down. So those are the two things I was thinking about as I watched the mass exodus in the theater that afternoon.
#RMF Scholarship Fund and Public Lecture
Following an initiative of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) Scholarship Committee as proposed by student activists at the University of Cape Town, the university has launched the #RMF Scholarship Fund and hosted an RMF public lecture on 9 April 2021. The lecture will be hosted annually hereafter.
The Rhodes Must Fall Scholarship Fund is a new initiative that aims to raise funding to support students engaged in scholarship around the decolonisation of higher education.