Man Asian Literary Prize, generally the most interesting one in the Man Booker stable, has been released.
The shortlist:
Jamil Ahmad – The Wandering Falcon
Jahnavi Barua – Rebirth
Rahul Bhattacharya – The Sly Company of People Who Care
Amitav Ghosh –River of Smoke
Kyung-Sook Shin – Please Look After Mom
Yan Lianke – Dream of Ding Village
Banana Yoshimoto – The Lake
Chilean poet Nicanor Parra has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor, for his influential work mixing everyday slang with traditional verse.
The 97-year-old poet, essayist and physics graduate was announced the winner Thursday in Madrid by Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde.
He published his first book of poetry in 1937 and eventually adopted the style he called anti-poetry, introducing colloquial language into traditional poetry, the Spanish Culture Ministry said.
He has won the Chilean National Literature Award twice — in 1969 and again in 1981 — and his work has been translated into many languages.
The €125,000 ($170,000) prize honors writers who contribute to the richness of Spanish-language literature, and generally alternates between Spanish and Latin American writers. Last year, it went to Spain’s Ana Maria Matute.
Other front-runners this year included Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua and Uruguay’s Eduardo Galeano.
First handed out in 1976, previous winners include Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Spain’s late Camilo Jose Cela, who also won the Nobel prize for literature.
Spain’s Cervantes prize goes to Chilean poet Parra – Yahoo!.
One can now know, literally, what flights are in the sky above you.
To access this literal, real-time flight search, just type “flights overhead†into the Wolfram Alpha search box, and voilá! If you’re using a desktop computer, Wolfram Alpha does its best to figure out your location automatically and — if there are flights in the sky above you — lists the commercial flights in the area. You’ll also see the planes’ altitude and angle against the horizon, how far away they are and the aircraft type.
Wolfram Alpha Offers New Twist On Flight Search: Literal Answers To What Planes Are Overhead.
From Google’s own Search blog:
Behind the simplicity of Google search is a complex set of algorithms that expands and improves the query you’ve typed to find the best results. Automatic spelling correction ([vynal] to “vinylâ€) and substituting synonyms (matching [pictures] to “photosâ€) are just two examples of the improvements we make.
In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users – but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for…
Since then, we’ve received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements…
You can access the verbatim search tool under “More search tools†on the left-hand side.
The 2011 National Book Award winners have been announced. Here they are:
Fiction: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA)
Nonfiction: Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company)
Poetry : Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)
Young People’s Literature: Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
via The Rumpus.net.