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The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize was announced earlier today. Looks like a decent enough list, although I’m pretty surprised that the David Mitchell book didn’t make it . . . Anyway, here’s the full list, and I’m sure over the next few days there will be tons of articles and posts analyzing this list. (Seeing that I haven’t read a single one of these books—although I am looking forward to C and the Emma Donoghue book sounds kinda creepy—I don’t really have anything to say . . . )
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue, Room
Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Tom McCarthy, C
Our own Dubravka Ugresic has made the “Judges’ List of Contenders” for the Man Booker International Prize! In case you were curious:
The Man Booker International Prize…highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.
This will be the third time they’ve given the prize—Chinua Achebe won in 2007 and Ismail Kadaré in 2005. They give the winner £60,000 and also, if necessary, they give a translation prize of £15,000—I presume to translate the books that haven’t yet been translated, since the prize is for English writing or “work [that] is generally available in translation in the English language”. Here’s the entire Judges’ list:
- Peter Carey (Australia)
- Evan S. Connell (USA)
- Mahasweta Devi (India)
- E.L. Doctorow (USA)
- James Kelman (UK)
- Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
- Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
- Alice Munro (Canada)
- V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
- Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
- Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
- Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)
- Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
- Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)
They’ll be announcing the winner sometime in May.
It’s some awfully stiff competition, but we think Dubravka can pull it off. Plus, she’s due to win one of these times.
Reviewed by Phillip Koyoumjian
The recent reissuing of several of Stig Dagerman’s novels by University of Minnesota Press has rekindled interest in his works, which have until now been little-known outside Sweden. Just twenty-four when he wrote A Burnt Child (here newly translated by. . .
Reviewed by Will Evans
Paul Klee’s Boat, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s newest bilingual collection of poems available in English, is an emotional journey through the bleakest seasons of the human soul, translated with great nuance by Andrew Wachtel. A former professional ice dancer(!), Polonskaya left the. . .
Reviewed by P.T. Smith
In Seiobo There Below, Lázló Krasznahorkai is able to succeed at a task at which many writers fail: to dedicate an entire novel to a single message, to express an idea over and over again without falling into repetition or. . .
Reviewed by George Carroll
There are curious similarities in three Italian mystery series, written by Maurizio de Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon.1
They’re all police procedurals, and all set in Italy: Naples, Sicily, Venice.
The three protagonists are Commissarios: Luigi Ricciardi, Salvo. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
Poetry always has the feel of mysticism and mystery, or maybe this feeling is a stereotype left over from high school literature class. It is generally the result of confusion, lack of time committed to consuming the poetry, and the. . .
Reviewed by J.T. Mahany
Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic is not only a translation, but a transformation. It is a translation of Jean Genet’s novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, transmuted from prose to poetry. Originally written in prison as a masturbatory aid (Sartre. . .
Reviewed by Will Evans
Equal parts stoner pulp thriller and psycho-physiological horror story, a pervasive sense of dread mixes with a cloud of weed smoke to seep into every line of the disturbing, complex Under This Terrible Sun. Originally published by illustrious Spanish publishers. . .
