asshat of the week
‘Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize selection committee, has revealed why American authors have no chance in Stockholm. In his opinion, American writers are “too insular,” “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture” and too ignorant to write good books. And Engdahl claims to know the reason behind their narrow-mindedness, too: “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”’
Der Spiegel // The Nobel Literature Debate: Uncle Sam Has Bigger Problems