"Susan Cheever... includes a heart-lacerating quote by her father: 'If you are an artist, self-destruction is quite expected of you.'"

"'The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes, as it did in my case, contemptible.' She notes that 'all five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholic — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.' (A proud tally.) And those are the ones who made it to the top. Lots of other great writers who didn’t receive the Nobel laurel were just as pie-eyed. Today, the pendulum seems to have swung again. Cheever says that most of our leading literary figures are fairly abstemious. Whether this will make for more interesting biographies remains to be seen."

From Christopher Buckley's review of Susan Cheever's "Drinking in America: Our Secret History."

"Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus..."

"Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there...."

In 1995, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, told Russian NTV television : “The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus. Germany was raised from the ruins thanks to firm authority, and not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and under Hitler it attained its peak.”...

This is the nemesis of the new Nobel Prize-winner in Literature....

"As Arab Spring demonstrations overthrow governments across the Middle East, a group of children in Daraa, southern Syria, are arrested and allegedly tortured for scrawling graffiti on a school reading 'the people want to topple the regime.'"

The first frame — "It all starts with graffiti" — from "Syria's war: Everything you need to know about how we got here."

MEANWHILE: "A coalition of labor unions, businesses, lawyers and human rights activists won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011....”

Among the disappointments of what has become known as the Arab Spring — collapsed states in Libya, Syria and Yemen; the return of rule by a military strongman in Egypt; and the rise of the Islamic State in the sectarian caldron of Syria and Iraq — the relative success of Tunisia’s transition to democracy has been a wisp of hope.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"...

... to Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus.

In an interview posted on the press’s website, Ms. Alexievich said her technique of blending journalism and literature was inspired by the Russian tradition of oral storytelling. “I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me,” she said. “Each person offers a text of his or her own.”

“By means of her extraordinary method — a carefully composed collage of human voices — Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy said.

ADDED: What's really interesting here is that the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded for writing  nonfiction, though it's not purely nonfiction. It's a "mix of nonfiction and fiction."

I want to know which purely nonfiction writers have won!

While the Nobel committee has occasionally awarded the prize to nonfiction writers, including Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, it has been decades since a journalist or historian has won. Some prominent writers, among them the New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, have called for the Nobel judges to recognize nonfiction as a worthy art form.

Eradicating river blindness.

I'm reading about William C. Campbell, "a master's and doctoral graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, [who] was awarded a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine."

River blindness... has been nearly eradicated thanks to Campbell's discoveries and the work of the Carter Center, which, working with the drug manufacturer Merck, has distributed more than 225 million free doses of the drug....