I have decided to completely rewrite this post to foreground the happy news that came in since my first attempt at it!You know that Christmas is near when the Best of Year lists start to appear, and a selection of writers and politicians recommend the best reads of the year at the Guardian here, here and here.
Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day is nominated as one of the best books of the year in the Guardian list by novelist Ann Tyler! Then on the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year List, no other than Ali Smith chooses it, saying of the novel :
Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel, Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), was largely ignored this year both by the press and the longlist/shortlist makers. I found it a good, strong, spirit-spiked story about caste and unfairness, as furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and an introduction to a writer whose talent with narrative structure combines elegance and potency.Another end of year list of best books of 2008, this time from Bookmarks Magazine via Amazon's Kindle site, and there is Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain!!!
Congrats to both!!
12 comments:
The second and third links are broken cuz of extra stuff in front of the actual URLs.
yes. the gremlin. thanks chet, i've removed the extra code.
Am happy about Preeta's book though my "take-aways" (sorry, MBA terms creep in) from the book are rather different.
Congratulations to Preeta!
- Poppadumdum
Sharon, I forgot you already had a post about this when I forwarded you the links -- aiyo, so perasanlah. Congrats to Twan Eng too! May many wake up on Christmas morning to find our books under the tree :-) .
-- Preeta
no lah my laziness, preeta. i posted the guardian link in a big hurry first time round and didn't notice your name. felt so bad when i realised. really happy now.
Congratulations, Preeta! And thanks for your lovely wishes!
:-))
Twan Eng
Excellent and well done those authors. May next year bring even greater accolades.
I call this "western fart syndrome". The name comes from what someone once told me when I ask why, if I put a western author next to a Malaysian one, the western author gets more attention. He said to me
"it's because people think western fart smells better."
It's the same reason why you didn't notice her on the list, and why when I was introduced to a Malaysian and Canadian, and told they were a CEO and driver, I auotmatically assumed the Malaysian was the driver, when it was the other way around.
Anonymous at 9:32 -- good grief, get a life. Sharon reads an enormous amount of stuff for this blog, and she has to plough through it all very quickly. That's why she missed my name even though she explicitly LOOKS for Malaysian authors' names everywhere. Her bias is, if anything, towards Asian literature, not against it. Besides, none of this is really your business, is it? If anyone wanted to get all huffy about her having briefly missed my name, it should be me, and I didn't see any reason to get huffy because I have an idea of how many different responsibilities Sharon is juggling at one time. So, as we say IN ASIA -- and while we're on the scatological metaphors -- wash your own backside, okay? If *you* automatically assume that Asians are servants and Westerners are bosses, that's your own bloody problem to work through with your own poor therapist. Stop projecting your hangups onto other people.
-- Preeta
Congratulations, Preeta!! So well-deserved for your beautiful, beautiful novel. Thanks, Biliobibuli, for posting.
LOL Preeta! i was slapdash careless, doing several things at once on the puter for which i am truly ashamed.
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