However sporadic my posting might be these days, you can always count on me for a Banville Bulletin - he's won the Kafka Prize.
An international jury which included German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and British publishder John Calder selected Banville for the prize, which is awarded annually and includes $10,000.
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I've had my head down the last week or so cleaning up the first half of my novel, so I managed to miss the news of both Philip Roth's winning of the Man Booker Prize, and Carmen Callil's absolutely idiotic comments in the wake of that victory.
"I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine. Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine . . .Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?
I mean, yes, OK, The Humbling - embarrassing. But come on.
Putting my head back down. Nice to see you all survived the Rapture.
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Houellebecq wins his Goncourt.
“Michel Houellebecq, at last!” declared Le Monde after the chairman of the Goncourt committee stood before a crush of journalists outside the Restaurant Drouant in Paris to confirm Houellebecq’s triumph for his latest novel.
The publication of a new Houellebecq title is a box-office event in France, and La Carte et Le Territoire , his quietest, least provocative novel, has been glowingly reviewed since it appeared in September.
Previously at TEV: Textually Transmissible.
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Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, has won the Man Booker Prize. Apparently, it's the first "unabashedly comic novel" to win the coveted prize.
There will be cries of "about time too" for a funny and warm writer, now 68, who has long been highly regarded but unrewarded when it comes to major literary prizes.
Kalooki Nights has been sitting around here unread since it showed up eons ago. Guess it's time.
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The Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to Mario Vargas Llosa. (MOTEV will be pleased.)
The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the Nobel in 1990, and focuses new attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortazar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s literary “boom generation.”
In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”
Seriously - has Ladbroke's ever gotten this call right? They haven't since I've been paying attention.
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I beg Marisa Silver's leave to briefly step on her guest blogging toes to announce my delirious happiness that Paul Harding's luminous Tinkers has won the Pulitzer Prize.
I have loved this book since I read it as part of the First Fiction Award I judged last year and have been meaning to add it to my Recommended sidebar ever since. (It's a sign of how things have slipped around here that I have not been able to do so yet.) Well, the book no longer needs my imprimatur, and I hope it will find the readers if deserves.
Heartfelt congratulations to Paul Harding and to his publishers at Bellevue Literary Press! I now step aside and return the spotlight to our esteemed guest blogger.
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Barnes and Noble has announced the 2009 Discover awards finalists. In fiction they are:
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Barb Johnson, More of This World or Maybe Another (HarperPerennial) |
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Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) |
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C. E. Morgan, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) |
I've read both the Morgan and the Lodato and think they are both worthy of the nod. Maud Newton's appreciation of All the Living can be found here.
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There are still tickets available for next week's Center for Fiction Awards Dinner, and although it's a steep tariff in these tough times, as you can see past events have been star-studded evenings, so if you're at all inclined to support the only organization in the country devoted solely to fiction, I know they'd love to have you. Hope to see you there ...
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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
