Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl has tipped his hand when it comes to considering an American for the Nobel prize for literature. He told the AP in an interview, “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.” Our writers are ”too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added, ”The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” […]
