Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.
This £10,000 prize will be awarded in May by Arts Council England (with Champagne Tattinger). Here, as listed on The Bookseller, are the longlisted books, whose English translations each published in the UK in 2008. The shortlist will be announced on April 1, 2009. My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia) The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello) Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) Night […]
The 2009 South East Asia and Pacific regional short lists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize have been announced, and FWR contributor Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day made the cut for Best First Book. Congratulations, Preeta!! Here are the short lists: Best Book Aravind Adiga, Between The Assassinations Helen Garner, The Spare Room Joan London, The Good Parents Paula Morris, Forbidden Cities Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap Tim Winton, Breath Best First Book Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger Nam Le, The Boat Mo Zhi Hong, The Year of The Shanghai Shark Bridget van der Zijpp, Misconduct Preeta Samarasan, Evening is […]
Two decades after the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie, it’s been revealed that Ian McEwan offered the author a place to hide — a cottage in the Cotswolds — and joined him there for some time. From the Guardian: This intimate detail is contained in a long profile of McEwan published in next week’s issue of the New Yorker. Written by an editor at the magazine, Daniel Zalewski, it explores McEwan’s growing commitment to science and rationality as a factor, alongside the Rushdie affair, behind the controversy over Islamic fundamentalism in which he later became embroiled. The Cotswold encounter […]
Forget the fictionalized memoir…here’s a novelist who seems to have revised his life story both on and off the page. Was Roberto Bolaño actually in Chile, as he proudly claimed, at the time of Pinochet’s military coup? Did he make up his story of heroin addiction and recovery? (His wife says he did.) Bolaño reportedly “liked to play tricks and create mysteries” and “may just have been trying to lay a trap for his future biographers.” Was he playing at being a posterity-worthy figure (not just writer)? Or was it all just an intellectual game? Manuel Llorente, the editor of […]
Big congratulations to Uwem, for securing the #1 spot on Entertainment Weekly‘s best book (fiction) of the year list!! Here’s their list of 2008’s “10 must-reads”–and here is Jennifer Reese’s review of the book from June.
Preeta Samarasan‘s Evening is the Whole Day is getting some well-deserved list love. For the Guardian‘s best books of 2008, Ann Tyler names the novel as one of her top three (along with two other books reviewed on FWR, Miriam Towes’s The Flying Troutmans and Richard Price’s Lush Life), and Ali Smith also chooses it (along with Toni Morrision’s A Mercy and the reprint of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity) for the Times Literary Supplement‘s Books of the Year List. Congratulations, Preeta! And thanks to fabulous lit-blogger Bibliobibuli for the news and links.
In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.
Happily, not everyone predicts an imminent doomsday for the book (or book publishing). David Ulin at the LA Times urges publishers to stop panicking and “focus on the writing rather than the noise.” And Amelia Atlas at the New York Observer talks to some industry insiders who think the book might do OK in a recession: reading is, after all, a form of escape. She herself suggests: “There are only so many times, it would seem, that the industry can hear the sound of its own death knell and still worry.” Still, she quotes Sonny Mehta as saying that “Fiction […]
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), […]
