109. Frédéric Mistral, 1904

108. Winston Churchill, 1953

107. Pearl S. Buck, 1938

105 (tie). Harry Martinson, 1974

105 (tie). Eyvind Johnson, 1974

104. William Golding, 1983

103. Jacinto Benavente, 1922

102. John Galsworthy, 1932

101. Odysseus Elytis, 1979

100. Camilo José Cela, 1989

99. Rudyard Kipling, 1907

98. Roger Martin du Gard, 1937

97. John Steinbeck, 1962

96. Hermann Hesse, 1946

95. Sinclair Lewis, 1930

94. Paul Heyse, 1910

93. Vicente Aleixandre, 1977

92. Rudolf Christoph Eucken, 1908

91. V.S. Naipaul, 2001

90. Pablo Neruda, 1971

In real life, William Gibson looks like you would imagine. A little older than the Gibson you imagine, but he was born in 1948, so it only stands to reason. He is gaunt and affable, clothes black, smart looking frames on his eyeglasses, more avuncular than professorial. And he really talks like that! Those neologisms and the sizzling chrome-finished turns of phrase? They fall out of his mouth in the course of conversation. He lives the gimmick.

Gibson appeared at the New York Public Library on Friday night for the LIVE From the NYPL series, and it was something of an occasion. Gibson, as active as he is in [...]

So you didn't win a Nobel Prize in Literature this week. Unless your name is Mr. Mo. Although, if you live in Europe, you did win a consolation Nobel Peace Prize at least. (Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is like giving an Oscar to Alf.) Anyway, I know, it’s total bullshit. You totally deserved it. But you might just be a calendar year away from getting the recognition you so obviously deserve. Let me show you the way.

I waited by the phone all week for that congratulatory call from overseas myself! Not for the stuff I’ve already written, which, let’s admit, is pretty amazing. But [...]

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Alexandre Dumas père was a terrible and a wonderful man. He fought in wars, hunted, traveled the globe, owned a theatre, dabbled in politics and revolutions here and there, and was bankrupted a few times after spending fortune after fortune on women and high living. And he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in jail or out of it. With the aid of a number of assistants he was able to turn out over 600 books before the end. He was magnificently ugly, and, apparently, irresistible. Which [...]

A British medical researcher has put forth a new theory on the disease that claimed Jane Austen's life. While previous speculation centered around Addison's disease or lymphoma, "Katherine White of the Addison's Disease Self Help Group has written an article for the British Medical Journal's Medical Humanities magazine in which she says that Austen probably died of tuberculosis caught from cattle." This postulation is actually borne out if one reads letters Austen sent to her family at the time, as well as the original ending of Sense and Sensibility, which was changed because it was thought to be too bleak.

"Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day…. It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones." Tom Shone looks at what happens when writers go on the wagon. [Fair warning: The piece calls Faulkner and Fitzgerald "the Paris and Britney of their day" and puts Ernest Hemingway in the Amy Winehouse role. Still, probably worth a click.]

Neat (yeah, suck it, it is neat) piece in the Journal on how the move to digitize literary works of antiquity has resulted in a number of new discoveries, including lost gospels, an alternate version of Medea in which the main character does not kill her children, and what is believed to be an attempt to reboot the Oedipus franchise by explaining that the Theban king and his wife Jocasta are "just cousins." (I may have made one of these things up.) Anyway, fascinating stuff.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would have been 63 today. Four years have passed since her death, but her absence is felt more, not less, with each. More than ever Sedgwick’s writing generates further writing and thinking from those who engage with it.

Sedgwick once said about reading affect theorist Silvan Tomkins: "I often get tired when I’m learning a lot." Her writing has the same effect—calming and invigorating—generative and tireless even if also sometimes tiring. In her posthumous collection, The Weather In Proust (2011), Sedgwick remarks that one form of antinormative reading can lead to many other types of theorizing—this is exactly how I feel about Sedgwick’s work. Forever [...]

Paul Newman’s egg-gorging feat in Cool Hand Luke certainly inspires wonder (along with a tinge of disgust). And yet each time I watch the film, I struggle with a nagging question raised by that stomach-swelling exploit: Which came first, our appetite, or our drive for competitive eating? Owing to the glut of cooking competitions, food trucks racing across town serving up sliders and duck-fat tots, foodies one-upping each other on Instagram and restaurants aggressively advertising their farm-to-table bona fides (as brilliantly satirized on "Portlandia"), food culture feels increasingly competitive in the broader, non-Kobayashi sense.

As the battles unfold to perform more impressive culinary feats, whether inhaling hot dogs [...]

14. Sex Packets 13. Glint 12. DMZ 11. Vitameatavegamin 10. Comanapracil 9. Gleemonex

Recently our neighbors at Flavorwire picked their ten best-dressed characters from literature. It's fascinating, if slightly heavy on film adaptions. ("Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary (1991)." No, that would be Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856)!) Isn't the best part of novels their ability to evoke striking images in the mind alone? Let's see if we can help!

To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's memoirs on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

Say you were to make a list of every American who has ever run for the vice presidency. Say you were to take that list to your local library. Say you were to sit at the reference computer, and say you were to type the names on your list into the "author" field of the electronic catalog, and say you were to run a search on each and every one. Among the results would be Doing Business by the Good Book: 52 Lessons on [...]