Bookshop staff spent Sunday carrying the same Anne Carson paperback from poetry to classics to essays and back again, sources close to the situation confirm, and nobody has slept. Oh, and she also won the Nobel prize in literature, which you may have heard about.
Insiders say the trouble is not new, darling. It has simply gone global. Autobiography of Red is a novel, except it is a poem. Her Euripides is ancient Greek, except it is also extremely now. Nox arrives folded in a box, and no shelf on earth was built for that.
By Sunday evening, one chain had reportedly grown its sections to fourteen, including "Myth", "Grief", "Essay That Is Secretly Opera" and "Unclear, Please Ask Staff". The fourteenth reads simply "Anne Carson". According to a floor plan seen by this reporter, it sits in the middle of all the other sections at the same time. Engineers call this impossible. Her readers call it obvious.
Writers have spent the week admitting that words fall short when it comes to Carson. Shop floors have fared no better.
