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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.
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Reading a genre book—whether fantasy, science fiction, crime, thriller, etc.—which begins to seem excessively, stereotypically bad, I have to make sure to ask myself: is this parodying the flaws of the genre? Usually, this questioning takes its time coming. In. . .
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The Sicilian Mafia has always been a rich subject for sensational crime fiction. The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos worked the mob’s bloody corpses and family feuds to both entertainment and artistic value. Giuseppe di Piazza’s debut novel attempts this,. . .
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Antoine Volodine’s vast project (40 plus novels) of what he calls the post-exotic remains mostly untranslated, so for many of us, understanding it remains touched with mystery, whispers from those “who know,” and guesswork. That’s not to say that, were. . .
Reviewed by Acacia O'Connor
It hasn’t quite neared the pitch of the waiting-in-line-at-midnight Harry Potter days, but in small bookstores and reading circles of New York City, an aura has attended the novelist Elena Ferrante and her works. One part curiosity (Who is she?),. . .
