best book cover of 2008
by Anne Stameshkin
Vote at the Book Design Review for 2008’s best cover. I hope this one wins:
Vote at the Book Design Review for 2008’s best cover. I hope this one wins:
It’s December, officially List Season. Those long, all-encompassing ones are fun to bitch about and debate, but my favorite lists are short and specific. A short list demands more careful consideration on the part of the list-maker, and readers have a prayer of actually checking out most or all of its best-of books/films/what-have-you. Today Jessa Crispin (aka Bookslut, here for NPR) offers a concise and enticing list of best foreign (or non-American) fiction of 2008, with links to full reviews and excerpts. I, for one, am adding Metropole to my reading pile; Roberto Bolano’s books are already there, waiting for […]
The Guardian offers some excerpts from this year’s worst sex scenes. Try reading them aloud at your Thanksgiving feast! From Simon Montefiore’s Sashenka: He’s a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy! He eased out of her again, showing himself. ‘Look!’ he whispered as she did. […] He made her forget she was a Communist.
Congratulations to Peter Matthiessen, whose novel Shadow Country just captured the 2008 NBA in Fiction. In this interview (conducted after his book was named a finalist), Mattheissen describes his writing process and shares why he thinks fiction matters. Interviewer Bret Anthony Johnston asked the author what the “engine” behind his novel was: BAJ: For some writers, the engine that powers their fiction is character. For others, it’s language. For others still, the engine might loosely be called “theme.” Do you identify with any of those? What sparked the initial idea for you? PM: Very important as those are, the seed […]
The Whiting Prizes are annual honors bestowed on emerging writers who show “exceptional talent and promise.” Congratulations to fiction writers Mischa Berlinski, Laleh Khadivi, Manuel Muñoz, Benjamin Percy and Lysley Tenorio. Click here to see a full list of winners. Whiting-winning essayist Donovan Hohn got a nice shout-out from Harper’s Wyatt Mason, who invites us to make Hohn’s work our “Weekend Read.” For a sampling of exquisite “concise creative nonfiction,” FWR highly recommends a detour to a website mentioned in said shout-out, Brevity. The site also features book reviews.
The White Tiger is 33-year-old Adiga’s first book, and one judge praised it as “the perfect novel.” Plot summary from BBC: “…a tale of two Indias…the story of Balram, the son of a rickshaw puller in the heartlands, one of the ‘faceless’ poor left behind by the country’s recent economic boom. It charts his journey from working in a teashop to entrepreneurial success.” You can read a sample chapter here and an interview with the author on the Booker Prize website. Congratulations to Aravind Adiga, and to the shortlisted runner-ups: Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), […]
Like many, I bristled at recent remarks by Nobel Prize Committee head Horace Engdahl that American writers are “ignorant,” “isolated,” and “insular,” unworthy of consideration for the prize. Guaridan writer Jean Hannah Edelstein agrees that these remarks were offensive but wonders if particular limitations imposed on American writers might restrict our capacity for literary greatness. In this article, she argues that American writers “need support to reinvent the national literature. This will require a great deal of support and sympathy from US publishers: what the industry must do, in order to give American literati the license to unequivocally scoff at […]
