"all things arise from a swerve"

"Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of papyrus and paper, books were often made of the pumice-smoothed skins of sheep, goats, deer, or, most luxuriously, of an aborted calf.
     The act of writing required rulers, awls, fine pens, and weights to keep the surfaces flat. Ink was a mix of soot, water, and tree gum; it was revised with knives, razors, brushes, rags, and page-restoring mixtures of milk, cheese, and lime. Squirming black creatures called bookworms liked to eat these pages, along with wool blankets and cream cheese. In the silence of monastery libraries, even the books’ contents were indicated by bodily gestures. Monks copying pagan books requested them by scratching their ears like dogs with fleas, or, if the book were particularly offensive, shoving two fingers in their mouths, as if gagging. In Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, these objects, offensive or sacred, are the primary players. [...]
     The book’s central character is a six-volume, two-millennia-old poem, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, that imagines a world made of crashing, combining atoms, denies life after death, prescribes the pursuit of pleasure as the rational goal of individuals and societies, and suggests that all things arise from a swerve — a slight and random deviation from course. [...]
     On the Nature of Things was, and is, brilliant. Lucretius, who intended the poetry to be the coat of sugar on the medicine of his philosophy, writes with astonishing grace about a world made of atoms, the ordinariness of humans, and the delusion of religion. Despite being a fundamentally atheistic text — Lucretius only allows a god or gods who couldn’t care less for people and our lonely prayers and sins — the text imagines the world as a poem to Venus. Lucretius imagines all those couplings and decouplings of atoms, as endlessly and wonderfully erotic. [...]"
— Swati Pandey, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage The Bones" Wins National Book Award

"The story of a poor black family struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina has won the National Book Award for fiction.
     Jesmyn Ward's second novel Salvage the Bones beat books including Téa Obrecht's Orange prize-winning title The Tiger's Wife to win the prestigious US prize, worth $10,000 (£6,300) and won in the past by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. Set in Mississippi, in the coastal town of Bois Sauvage just before Katrina hits, Salvage the Bones tells of Esch, 15 and pregnant, and her three brothers as they search for food and try to protect each other.
  
     Ward, who was in Mississippi herself when Katrina hit, wanted to write 'about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South,' the Associated Press reported. Her own experience of the hurricane was 'traumatic … to say the least,' she added. 'We went out into the storm, sheltered in our cars for hours, were denied shelter by a white family who told us we could sit outside in their field but couldn't shelter in their house, and then made our way to an intersection where another family, again white, took us in,' she said." — Alison Flood, Guardian
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"Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction Wednesday. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney's Head Off & Split, summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai's Inside Out & Back Again, the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people's literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September." — Huffington Post
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