It seemed as if the number of attendees on the first VIP day of the “Art Basel” fair in Switzerland surprised almost everyone.

“There were days when no one wanted to come and there were days when we felt like no one was going to be here, but we have to do it anyway,” says Marc Glimcher, president of Megabase.

It was only by last week, Glimcher said, “I felt the show was going to be good.”

Known as the world’s most prestigious art gallery, Art Basel boasts 272 galleries selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artwork to the world’s ultra-rich.

During normal years, anticipation and hype lead to a (high-end) crowd at the opening, as collectors rush to their favorite departments to buy them before they are snatched away by someone else.

That rush was decimated in 2020, due to the complete cancellation of the exhibition, which can be attended in person, and moved to online preview rooms.

Then the 2021 edition was postponed until September. Since then, many galleries have cautiously re-entered the art market, but none have matched the level – or degree of the exhibit – enjoyed by Art Basel.

This means that the art world has had to wait more than two years for the Swiss gallery to bring together the high-quality, high-priced artworks to provide a true test of the market.

The first show on “Broadway” theaters opened Wednesday, since the Corona pandemic in 2020 closed theaters in New York City, while the public had to get vaccinated and put on masks in order to attend.

Tickets for the premiere of “Pass Over,” a modernized version of “Waiting for Godot,” at the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan, are all sold out.

The rules announced by “Broadway theaters” last week oblige the audience, actors, and theater workers to obtain a full vaccination, as well as to wear masks throughout the show period, and the rules allow theaters to receive their maximum capacity from the audience.

safety protocols
Director Dania Taymour said: “The atmosphere is amazing, we had a rehearsal, we had about 500 people here. The tangible joy and gratitude of the audience made me cry.”

The premiere of “Pass Over” will be followed by a free street party outside the theatre.

Taymour added, “The actors and crew strictly followed safety protocols, we all wear masks, and the audience is, so the situation is completely safe with regard to Covid-19.”

Most Broadway shows, including major musicals such as “Hamilton”, “The Lion King” or “The Lion King” and “Wicked” or (The Villain), are scheduled to reopen in September, after theaters have been closed since March 2020 when the epidemic broke out. in New York for the first time.

“I hope this gathering will be a celebration not only of the band but also of an audience that has so much confidence that they can sit inside with a thousand people and trust that it (the play) will be safe,” Timur said.

Rock star Bruce Springsteen launched the opening of Broadway theaters for the first time after Corona, with his solo show “Springsteen on Broadway” in June, but in front of a limited audience.

French writer Emmanuel Carrier won the “Princess of Asturias” award in Spain, one of the most prominent literary prizes in Spanish-speaking countries.

The jury awarded the prize to the French writer, who has authored many novels, including “The Opponent”, a “Russian Novel” and finally “Yoga”, “in recognition of his personal production, which created a new space for expression.”

The committee, chaired by Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy, said Emmanuel Carrier paints “a vitriolic picture of current society and has a remarkable impact on our contemporary literature”.

“Without being a Spanish speaker, unfortunately for me, I have a taste for Spanish-language literature,” the French writer told AFP.

He added: “The greatest interest in my books is in Spanish-speaking countries, and this makes me very happy, and I feel a kind of affinity with Spanish readers.”

Emmanuel Carrier, 63, is considered one of the most prominent names in French literature today, and his credit is rich with a series of successes with literary publications that consistently top the list of best-selling novels.

Carrier won many awards during his career, including the Rinodo Prize in 2011 for his book “Limonov.” He practiced scriptwriting, worked as a journalist and actor, and was busy writing biographies and writing novels, in addition to being a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker.

Over the past 40 years, Carrier has enriched the literary library with works of fiction based on self-exploration, including accounts of the lives of others, from murderer Jean-Claude Romain in “The Adversary” to Russian writer Eduard Limonov in “Limonov”.

When I see the lilies,
They remind me of
All the silly things we did
When we were silly kids.
Like jumping around and making weird sounds.
It felt free being me, spending time with all you beautiful beings.
When I see the stars,
I can’t help but go back to that moonlit night in the desert.
When we stayed up gazing at the stars for six straight hours,
waiting for the sun to come up.
It was fun and it felt free to be me.
When I see a lake,
the memories of us sitting by the river come rushing like those
Cheery waves and wash me over
with all the memories we made that day.
Those days that can never come back,
will remain forever in my head.
And I wonder, would it ever be the same going forward.
And I wonder why things had to change in the past few years
Oh, the memories of us
Are tangy like tangerines
And crazy like the best of us.
Savoury like strawberries and sweet like melons
but these memories are all that’s left of me and you,
thinking about all the things we did together.

On Friday, Gallimard announced that sales of Hervé Le Tillier’s novel “Lanomale”, winner of the 2020 “Goncourt”, the most prestigious French literary prize, have surpassed the threshold of one million copies.

“Week after week, the book continues to sell very well, we have not yet reached the end of this phenomenon,” Jean-Charles Grunstein, commercial director of Gallimard, told Agence France-Presse.

The sales of “Lanomaly” (anomalies), of which 12,500 copies were distributed in August 2020, which were not featured among the literary books of this house, accelerated thanks to the selection by the jury for the “Autumn Literary Awards”, and the closure of libraries from late October to early Last December, sales-focused on some successful business, including this book.

The exact sales number is still uncertain. According to Gallimard, the total number of copies is 954,000 in France and abroad, while 770,000 copies of the novel have been sold in France, according to the GFK board.

“Lanomaly”, which is the eighth of Herve Le Tillier’s novels, revolves around the consequences of a strange event represented by two flights between Paris and New York, which happened to carry the same passengers with a time difference of no more than a few months, as the novel brilliantly mixes different literary genres, including the black novel and the classic literary narrative. And science fiction.