FixWhatUSee

British author Ian McEwan has made an eloquently powerful attack on the Israeli government's policies in his speech accepting the Jerusalem prize for literature. Addressing his remarks at the opening ceremony of Jerusalem's International Book Fair to "Israeli and Palestinian citizens of this beautiful city", the novelist said: "Hamas has embraced the nihilism of the suicide bomber, of rockets fired blindly into towns, and the nihilism of the extinctionist policy towards Israel." But it was also nihilism that fired a rocket at the home of the Gazan doctor, Izzadin Abu Eilash, killing three of his daughters and a niece during the Gazan war. "And it is nihilism to make a long-term prison camp of the Gaza Strip. Nihilism has unleashed a tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories." " The opposite of nihilism is creativity. The mood for change, the hunger for individual freedom that is spreading through the Middle East is an opp...

Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes made a list of the best young British novelists in 1983; David Foster Wallace, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jeffrey Eugenides were named among the best American writers under 40 in 1999. Now the New Yorker has selected the 20 young writers it believes we'll be reading in years to come, with Jonathan Safran Foer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Joshua Ferris and Wells Tower all making the cut. via guardian.co.uk America top 20: best writers who are from or based in north America Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32 Chris Adrian, 39 Daniel Alarcón, 33 David Bezmozgis, 37 Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38 Joshua Ferris, 35 Jonathan Safran Foer, 33 Nell Freudenberger, 35 Rivka Galchen, 34 Nicole Krauss, 35 Dinaw Mengestu, 31 Philipp Meyer, 36 C E Morgan, 33 Téa Obreht, 24 Yiyun Li, 37 ZZ Packer, 37 Karen Russell, 28 Salvatore Scibona, 35 Gary Shteyngart, 37 Wells Tower, 37 Posted via web from Zoid's reading the Wide Web