Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for works that the prize judges called “a monument to suffering and courage.”
One my very first acts as a new New Yorker many years ago was to make the journey across three boroughs to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx. My purpose: a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave. I came not to worship a hero, exactly, but—as Fordham University English professor Angela O’Donnell writes—“to see a friend.” Professor O’Donnell goes on: “It might seem presumptuous to regard a celebrated 19th-century novelist so familiarly, but reading a great writer across the decades is a means of conducting conversation with him and, inevitably, leads to intimacy.” I fully share the sentiment.
Tagged in: Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, nobel prize, Open Culture, PC game, Svetlana Alexievich, The Dark Eye (video game), The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart (Bantam Classics), united states, William S. Burroughs
