| September 13, 2008 | - Author David Foster Wallace committed suicide,.
| Source:
Los Angeles Times
|
| August 2, 2008 | -
Franz Kafka's secret porn stash was brought to light. “Animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action,” said researcher James Hawes. “It's quite unpleasant.”
| Source:
Times Online
|
| July 9, 2008 | -
Osama Bin Laden’s teenage son Hamza wrote and posted online a poem asking God for help against Western “gangs of infidels.”
| Source:
Telegraph UK
|
| June 1, 2008 | -
Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel in 1992, read a new poem, entitled “The Mongoose,” that viciously attacks Naipaul's personality and his writing. “I have been bitten,” the poem begins, “I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction.”
| Source:
Guardian
|
| May 31, 2008 | -
V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Literature, declared that there are “no more great writers.”
| Source:
The Independent
|
| January 28, 2008 | - A plot by retired Turkish
Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 15, 2007 | - Six million dollars in Nobel Prizes were awarded to: a pair of physicists who discovered giant magnetoresistance; a chemist who created a method for studying surface chemical reactions such as rust; three doctors who used stem cells to deactivate mouse genes; three economists who study malfunctioning markets; novelist Doris Lessing; and documentary film star Al Gore, who, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was cited for efforts “to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract [climate] change.”
| Source:
Nobelprize.org
|
| August 24, 2007 | - John Ashbery was named the poet laureate of MTV.
| Source:
NY Times
|
| August 23, 2007 | -
Grace Paley died.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 2, 2007 | - It was announced that Reagan's
diaries would be published. “Getting shot,” he wrote in 1981, “hurts.”
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| April 12, 2007 | -
Kurt Vonnegut died.
| Source:
NYT
|
| February 18, 2007 | - A book called The Higher Power of Lucky, the winner of this year's Newbery Medal, was reportedly banned from several school libraries because it includes the word “scrotum.”
| Source:
NYT
|
| January 31, 2007 | - After it ransacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Washington, D.C., residence, a small black bird was captured in a brown bag and released. “She kept thinking to herself,” said a spokesman, “‘Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”’”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| January 24, 2007 | - Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish reporter and author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including The Soccer War, died.
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 13, 2007 | -
Robert Anton Wilson died.
| Source:
New Fnord Times
|
| November 16, 2006 | - Parents in Illinois were lodging complaints against an elementary school library for carrying And Tango Makes Three, a children's book based on a true story about gay male penguins.
| Source:
CBS 3
|
| November 16, 2006 | - In response to widespread public criticism, Rupert Murdoch announced that he would not publish If I Did It, a book by O. J. Simpson in which the former football star describes how he carried out the 1994 killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
| Source 1:
The New York Times
Source 2:
Times Online
|
| August 16, 2006 | - Pacifist ex-Nazi
Günther Grass got to keep his Nobel Prize.
| Source 1:
The New York Times
Source 2:
The Australian
|
| August 12, 2006 | -
Günter Grass announced that he had once been a member of the Nazi SS.
| Source:
Telegraph.co.uk
|
| July 31, 2006 | - A Chicago woman was suing Borders Books after she was “permanently disfigured” in a toilet seat accident.
| Source:
CBS2 Chicago
|
| June 3, 2006 | -
Pakistan banned
The Da Vinci Code. “Degradation of any prophet,” said Minister of Culture Ghulam Jamal, “is tantamount to defamation of the rest.”
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| April 17, 2006 | - Author Muriel Spark died.
| Source:
The Herald
|
| March 27, 2006 | -
Stanislaw Lem died.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| February 28, 2006 | - Author Octavia Butler died.
| Source:
The Los Angeles Times
|
| February 19, 2006 | - Author Margaret Atwood was planning to avoid book tours by signing books via remote-controlled robot.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| February 12, 2006 | -
Peter Benchley died.
| Source:
AP via the New York Times
|
| February 9, 2006 | - Author Michael Crichton received a journalism award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for his novel State of Fear, which criticizes the theory of global warming. "It is fiction," said a spokesman for the petroleum geologists, "but it has the absolute ring of truth."
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| January 11, 2006 | - A Maryland
school superintendent decided to lift a ban on the book The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things in high-school libraries; the ban remained in effect for middle-school libraries.
| Source:
WGAL.com
|
| January 8, 2006 | - It was reported that author James Frey's best-selling memoir was heavily fictionalized, and that author J.T. Leroy was being played in public by a woman named Savannah Knoop.
| Source 1:
The Smoking Gun
Source 2:
NY Times
|
| December 10, 2005 | - Science-fiction author Robert Sheckley died.
| Source:
UPI
|
| October 17, 2005 | -
Ba Jin died.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| October 13, 2005 | - Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 6, 2005 | - A British reverend told a group of 12-year-olds that Harry Potter was “not the only gay in the village”.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| August 16, 2005 | -
Victoria Beckham, also known as Posh Spice, said that she had never read a book in her life, although she had written a 528-page autobiography.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| July 17, 2005 | - Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who returned to Pakistan after three years in Guantánamo Bay, said that writing poetry kept him sane while imprisoned. “They may have weapons and missiles,” he wrote, “but we can find no sign of manhood in this army.”
| Source:
SF Gate
|
| May 24, 2005 | -
Sylvester Stallone was making a movie about Edgar Allen Poe.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| May 6, 2005 | - A college student in New Jersey unearthed an 1888 interview with Walt Whitman in which Whitman gave advice to young men pursuing a career in literature. “First, don't write poetry,” he said. “Second ditto; third ditto.”
| Source:
ABC News
|
| May 4, 2005 | - A papyrologist at Oxford University announced that new techniques in spectral imaging, which make it possible to decipher previously illegible ink on papyrus fragments, have yielded parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, a novel by Lucian, and an epic poem by Archilochos; researchers also applied the technique to third- and fourth-century manuscripts of the Revelation of Saint John and discovered that the number of the beast, contrary to popular belief, is 616, the area code of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
| Source:
National Post
|
| April 24, 2005 | - The Venezuelan government announced “Operation Dulcinea,” which will distribute one million copies of the novel Don Quixote to the public. “We're still oppressed by giants,” said the Venezuelan minister of culture.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 17, 2005 | -
Scientists used infrared technology to read lost works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| April 8, 2005 | - A long-lost poem written by Tennessee Williams was discovered.
| Source:
Washington University
|
| April 5, 2005 | -
Saul Bellow died.
| Source:
AP
|
| April 3, 2005 | - Ten million eight hundred thousand copies of the next Harry Potter book were being printed.
| Source:
Argus Leader
|
| March 30, 2005 | - Developers in England were about to start construction on Dickens World, a $113 million theme park that will offer an Ebenezer Scrooge ride and Dickens characters on ice.
| Source:
SEEDA
|
| December 29, 2004 | -
Susan Sontag died,
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 25, 2004 | -
Anthony Hecht died.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| October 8, 2004 | - Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian novelist, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| December 6, 2003 | - A 200-line fragment by Menander was discovered in the Vatican Library.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| September 16, 2003 | - Attorney General John Ashcroft mocked librarians for their opposition to provisions of the USA Patriot Act that permit federal agents to seize citizens' library records; Ashcroft said that the librarians were indulging in "baseless hysteria" and wondered why the FBI would care "how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel." He did not make clear why the government needs access to library records, however.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 3, 2003 | - Jessica Lynch, the former Army private who was captured by Iraqis and became the subject of an elaborate heroic fiction, signed a book deal and reportedly received a $1 million advance.
Lynch will share the advance with her co-author Rick Bragg, a former New York Times reporter.
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