Sellerating Away!

I was very happy to receive my copy of  Clutch, Brake, Sellarator - the compilation of the winning entries for last year's MPH Short Story Competition, for which I was one of the judges. Encountering the stories again reminded me of the morning all those months ago the six of us battled it out over the 20 stories that had been shortlisted for us. And I have to point out that anything I say in this post reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the judging panel as a whole.

There were, you will remember, two grand prize winners.

Tan Twan Eng's  Some Things Will Remain set the bar for the competition very high indeed (as you would expect from a Booker-longlisted author) I loved the control of the piece - not a word is wasted and the story builds and builds to its heart-stopping climax while the peace and beauty of the setting, a lotus-covered lake, contrasts so starkly with the ugliness of the crime. I appreciated too how much is left unsaid, for the reader to bring their own interpretation of events to the story. 

The title story by Ivan Yeo was enjoyed by all the judges for its humour, carefully observed characters (we particularly loved the "not girlfriend"), and strong Malaysian voice. However,  I must confess that I found it a little over-written in places and I personally had a problem with the sudden change of mood at the end which seemed out of keeping with the rest.  But it is a very strong debut piece and I do hope that Ivan keeps writing : control and craft can be learned, but the strong storyteller is there already.

Of the runners-up, the story I thought strongest was Lee Eeleen's The Englishman at Table 19. It is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story, and a comedy exploring the family holiday from hell: it works very well on all these levels.

Pilling Time is a surreal short story by Shih Li Kow which the judges enjoyed very much.  It was very nicely written (and would we expect any less from Shih-Li?)  but I have to say that I preferred her more "rooted-in-the real-world" pieces in Ripples.

The Hunter and the Tigress by Zed Adam Idris is a dark and magical story which captures the smell and feel of the Malaysian rainforest. It's disturbing (I found particularly chilling the scene where the tiger design on the plate begins to move and bites the hand of the man trying to steal it) and it doesn’t give easy answers.  I was interested to see in the notes in the front of the book that this piece had grown from a short short story - because I've told Zed that it feels as if it needs to grow larger still and perhaps become a novella.

Vincent Foo's The Cobra's Mate is set in Sarawak.  I liked that there was plenty of action  and that the writer manages to maintain tension. I was fascinated by the insights into the dayak culture of the time.  


The competition has, I think, been very important in opening up another avenue for local writers, and in encouraging short story writing, and this collection is well worth a read.   I'm looking forward to next year so I can send in an entry myself!

Booker Longlist Announced

The longlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced just a short time ago.  Apparently this  "Booker's Dozen" of 13 books was selected from a total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges. 

Peter Carey - Parrot and Oliver in America 

Emma Donoghue - Room 

Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal

Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question 

Andrea Levy - The Long Song

Tom McCarthy - C 

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet  

Lisa Moore - February 

Paul Murray - Skippy Dies

Rose Tremain - Trespass

Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap 

Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky

 I'll post links to each of the books and the general discussion later.


Afterthought :

Yes - where IS McEwan????


Postscript :


John Self twittered a summary for lazy journos :

Hooks to hang your Booker story on: 1. List very white. 2. One's a sequel. 3. No McEwan. 4. Not many new names. You're welcome

Dutch Gardener Wins IMPAC

The IMPAC Dublin Prize, the world's richest literary award, has been won by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker with his debut novel The Twin.

The synopsis of the novel reads :

When Helmer’s twin brother dies in a car accident, he is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.

The panel of judges, which this year included Anne Fine, commented :

Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style. ... The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him. There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of his own life.

According to Alison Flood in The Guardian, Bakkar got the idea for the book while he was hiking in the mountains of Corsica in 2002.  He said he had the idea of a son :

who was going to do something terrible to his father. ... It stayed in my mind for months and I got so frustrated – nothing was happening with the idea. Then I just sat down and got writing. I didn't know where I was going, I just started – for me that's a good way to write.

Bakkar is a gardener by trade and says that writing and gardening :

... work well together. In the autumn when I rake the dead leaves I can do it for hours – once I even disturbed a pile I'd made so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think in a subconscious way, in the back of your mind. 

Bakker also works as a skating instructor in the winter.

Farrell's Troubles Wins Lost Booker

Troubles by J.G. Farrell, the first novel of his Empire Trilogy,  has been declared the winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, forty years after it was first published. You may remember reading on this blog that this special prize was awarded by the Booker committee to honour the books that fell through the net when the rules were changed in 1970.

The press release describes the book :

Set in Ireland in 1919, just after the First World War, Troubles tells the tragic-comic story of Major Brendan Archer who has gone to visit Angela, a woman he believes may be his fiancée. Her home, from which he is unable to detach himself, is the dilapidated Majestic, a once grand Irish hotel, and all around is the gathering storm of the Irish War of Independence.

Claire Armistead in The Guardian says :

... to say that Farrell is a predictable winner is to undervalue his extraordinary resurrection and what it says about readers' continuing ability to recognise a great book when they see one. Troubles is a work of characteristic depth and humour, which views the decline of the British empire through the prism of a decaying seaside hotel – pointedly named the Majestic – in Wexford. ... Farrell's gift was the ability to immerse himself so thoroughly in his worlds, whether early 20th-century Ireland or mid-19th century India, that he never seems to preach as he tackles the big issues of race, culture and class.

It sounds as if the finding of the Lost Booker was a very valuable exercise indeed.  If Farrell had actually won in 1970, he would have been the first author to have won the prize twice.

Sadly, Farrell drowned while out fishing, aged 44.

Postscript :

Sam Jordison on The Guardian blog says :

Farrell's portrayal of the fast-decaying Majestic Hotel and England's even more rapidly crumbling rule in Ireland surely adds up to one of the best books of the last half-century, let alone 1970.

Three Friends on Frank O'Connor Longlist!

Biggest congrats to friends longlisted for the Frank O'Connor short story award : Wena Poon for The Proper Care of Foxes; David T.K. Wong for Chinese Stories in Times of Change and O Thiam Chin for Never Been Better. (All three books are sitting on my dining table been read in rotation! And if you should want copies of your own, they all should be in our local bookshops.) 

The total longlist is 54 strong this year (comprising 26 women/ 28 men; 21 Americans, 12 British, 6 Indians, 3 Canadians, 3 Irish, 2 New Zealanders, 2 Singaporeans, and one each from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Bulgaria, China, US Virgin Islands. 

David TK Wong, incidentally, is appearing at Readings@Seksan this Saturday and reading an extract from the new novel he is working on.

Postscript :

The longlist for the Edge Hill Short story prize has also just been announced.

Tinkers Wins Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year goes to Paul Harding for Tinkers. According to The New York Times its :

... a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.

And the runners up were Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet :

...an imaginative collection of linked stories, often describing a memorable encounter between a famous person and an animal, underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles ...

and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin:

... a collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

You can read about the recipients of the award in the different categories on the Pulitzer website. (And its great to see Hank Williams getting a special citation, isn't it?)

Postscript :

Tinkers has been acclaimed one of the strongest debut American novels, and it is heartwarming to learn that it was published by a small press. The Bellevue Press site has an impressive collection of  quotes about the book from a range of newspapers. There's also a very good interview with the author (dating from last year) on the Bookslut blog and you can read an extract from the novelhere.
.
In the comments Chet mentions a very interesting post by Ginny Wiehardt about the lessons we can learn from this winner. I was particularly intrigued by his writing process. He says he wrote episodes and then "collaged" them together:

I don't write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and write about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I'm wondering, I have a question about something. 'What does she think at that point?' Or, 'What does he do?' . . . And I just start writing. Eventually, I have to have faith in the process, it happened with Tinkers so I'm hoping it will happen again, eventually everything ends up overlapping.

This is definitely a novel I must read.

I must say though the pallid cover does the book no favours on the internet - it looks completely washed out, doesn't it? Lucky though the book buyer who holds a first edition hardback copy of the book - prices are climbing.

If It's Not a Good Read ...

I am often amazed by how sloppy the books by massive names are ... Sometimes we took a deep breath before agreeing that probably this book, had it been written by a debut author, would not have been looked at.

Richard Lea in The Guardian quotes Anne Fine one of the judges for the IMPAC Dublin Literary award : Philp Roth, Salman Rushdie and José Saramago are among those who failed to make the shortlist this year.  and I think that we would wholeheartedly agree with her criterion :

If it's not a good read, then it's not a good book

(But have to agree to differ with the judges about Joseph O'Neill's novel being a "good read".  Please do let me know, anyone out there, if you actually enjoyed it!)

The shortlist which includes works in translation  :

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Translated from the original Dutch by David Colmer)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Translated from the original French by Alison Anderson)

In Zodiac Light by Robert Edric

Settlement by Christoph Hein

The Believers by Zoë Heller

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

God's Own County by Ross Raisin 

Libraries around the world selected the books for the longlist as usual. The National Library of Malaysia nominated Rainforest Tears. (More here.)  I am sure that Paul Leslie Smith and his publisher Marshall Cavendish will be thrilled at having made the longlist. I'm surprised that there was no publicity about this.

The Lost Booker

The longlist for the 1970 Booker Prize has just been announced. Nope, you didn't read that wrong.  We're talking about what's come to be known as The Lost Booker.

When entry criteria for the prize changed in 1971, books published the previous year were ineligible.  Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation comments :

I noticed that when Robertson Davies's Fifth Business was first published it carried encomiums from Saul Bellow and John Fowles both of whom judged the 1971 Booker Prize. However judges for 1971 said it had not been considered or submitted. This led to an investigation which concluded that a year had been excluded. I am delighted that, even in a Darwinian way, this year, with so many extraordinary novels, can now be covered by the Man Booker Prize.

But now a team comprising newsreader Katie Derham, poet and novelist Tobias Hill and Observer journalist Rachel Cooke (pictured above ... and all born around 1970) have put together a longlist of 21 titles :

Brian Aldiss - The Hand Reared Boy
Paul Bailey - Trespasses
H.E.Bates - A Little Of What You Fancy
Nina Bawden - The Birds On The Trees
Melvyn Bragg - A Place In England
Christy Brown - Down All The Days
Len Deighton - Bomber
J.G.Farrell - Troubles
Elaine Feinstein - The Circle
Shirley Hazzard - The Bay Of Noon
Reginald Hill - A Clubbable Woman
Susan Hill - I'm The King Of The Castle
Francis King - A Domestic Animal
David Lodge - Out Of The Shelter
Iris Murdoch - A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Shiva Naipaul - Fireflies
Patrick O'Brian - Master and Commander
Mary Renault - Fire From Heaven
Ruth Rendell - A Guilty Thing Surprised
Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat
Patrick White - The Vivisector

More here at The Guardian.

The Independent highlights the irony of Australian author Patrick White being nominated for such an award posthumously when he loathed literary accolades, and hated the thought of winning the Booker. He demanded to have his name removed from the list in 1979, and sent a friend to collect his Nobel Prize!

Boyd Tonkin points out that bestselling and genre fiction does well on the list, something which has changed since :

The past also looks different once formerly low-ranking kinds of writing rise in our esteem. JG Farrell would go to win with Booker in 1973 (for The Siege of Krishnapur), but in general his brand of richly researched and densely plotted historical fiction would not see its critical stock inch up until well into the next decade. As for the presence of Mary Renault on this shortlist, it indicates a fairly recent willingness to celebrate high-quality bestsellers for literary as well as commercial reasons. Yet change can still be slow. A contemporary equivalent of her much-admired tale of the young Alexander the Great would still struggle to make a Man Booker shortlist today.

Too Much Misery in Women's Lit?

There's not been much wit and not much joy, there's a lot of grimness out there ... Thereare a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing. ... I think the misery memoir has had its day, but there are an awful lot of books out there which had not a shred of redemption in them. I'm more of a light and shade person and there does need to be some joy, not just misery. ... I was surprised at how little I laughed … and the ones where there was humour were much appreciated I can tell you.

Judge Daisy Goodwin (the wonderful populariser of poetry) talks about what it was like to read 129 entries for The Orange Prize in three months, and says that she was sometimes driven to despair by the bleakness of the submissions. (Philip Henser in The Independent and William Skidelsky in The Observer both nod sagely in agreement, and this point really does beg wider discussion.)

But, says Godwin, she and her fellow judges are very proud of the longlist of 20 titles they have drawn up for the prize.  It features an both established authors (some names that spring out are Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Barbara Kingsolver, Sarah Waters, MJ Hyland and Sadie Jones) and seven first time novelists from around the world. (Click table to enlarge.)


The Orange Prize is 15 years old this year, and shows no sign of buckling under the annual exclamations of outrage that it is unfair to continue a prize which sidelines male fiction writers.

Postscript :

Elizabethhc on The Reading Copy blog blames Oprah for the trend of miserable reads.

Samoan Poet Wins Regional Commonwealth Prize

Congrats to Samoan  poet and novelist Albert Wendt for winning the Best Novel Award the South East Asia and Pacific region for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. His epic novel-in-verse The Adventures of Vela is described in The Sydney Morning Herald as :

... "an exhilarating read'' that blends traditional storytelling and song with contemporary rock music and hip-hop.

The award for best first novel for the region went to Australian Glenda Guest for Siddon Rock.

These are the regional shortlists in their entirety :

Best Book shortlist:

• Summertime by J.M Coetzee (Australia)
• A Good Land by Nada Awar Jarrar (Australia)
• The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt (Samoa)
• Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
• The People's Train by Thomas Keneally (Australia)
• Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey (Australia)

(Perhaps the only Malaysian book that could have been in the running for this prize this time was Tash Aw's Map of the Invisible World, and it is very sad not to see it up there.)

Best First Book shortlist :

• The Ice Age by Kirsten Reed (Australia)
• After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld (Australia)
• Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho (Australia)
• Document Z by Andrew Croome (Australia)
• Come Inside by Glenys Osborne (Australia)
• Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Australia)

 (So it really wasn't a surprise that an Australian won!)

The regional shortlists for the Commonwealth Writers prize were announced a few days back, and you can see them in their entirety here.

We may not have had a Malaysian on the shortlist, but we did have one on the panel of judges.  Congrats too the Kee Thuan Chye!

The overall winner will be announced next month.

Australia-Asia literary Prize Scrapped

Found some sad news at the Literary Saloon website.  Apparently, the (A$110,000) Australia-Asia Literary Award, which gave local writers a very welcome shot at an international award, has been scrapped after just one year. But the decision to pull the plug, of course,  wasn't entirely unexpected. 

Read Great Lit to Save your Souls

Malaysian youths must be exposed to more local literature that highlight noble values like respect and responsibility ... Reading high-quality literature needs to be encouraged because it is the best way to inculcate the culture of knowledge and instill positive values in our youths.

said Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin (who is also the deputy PM) at the presentation of the Hadiah Sastera Perdana Malaysia (Malaysia Premier Literary Award), The Star reports today. (There's a much fuller account of what he actually said on the Bernama website which actually reads much better.)

It is great to see such support of literature, but I'd remind the minister that we read for pleasure, the rest follows : along the way, it might actually make us better people, but it "being good for us" is never the reason why we pick up a book.  

But I do agree with him that it would be great to see local literature make the transition to other media, but please make translation into English a priority!!

And it's good that there is a RM200mil Creative Industry Fund, but it would be nice to see some of the money spent on what writers actually need in this country - courses, workshops, resources,  grants and bursaries. 

And not just for Malay language writers - those writing in English are doing so much to put the country on the map internationally, and there are Chinese and Tamil writers to consider too.

But anyhow you can't just throw money at something and expect it to happen.  Those that are making a mark internationally are, in every case,  those who have had the gumption to do something for themselves and the willingness to make big sacrifices.

It is indeed sad that the Award has now dropped its English language category, and I feel *big sigh* there is something symbolic in that too. it also strikes me as really odd that the awards were for books published several years ago - this gives the impression of some not-being-on-the-ballness which might give the prize an image problem.

Anyway, all this minister speak has overshadowed the actual results so here are the prize winners :

Among the works that received the award were a children’s novel, Azrul Wira Anak Laut (by Hassan Omar), a novel for adolescents Me­­nikam Kalbu (Faisal Tehrani), an anthology of poems entitled Salju Shibuya (Muhammad Salleh) and anthology of short stories entitled Mekar Sakura di Mimbar Cinta (Ilham Hamdani) .... Arena Wati was given the HSPM 2004-2005 posthumously for his book Armageddon Jilid 1: Mandala.

Biggest congrats on your success!

Costa for Colm

The Costa Book Awards have been announced.

Colm Tóibín beat out strong competition including Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall to take the Novel Award for Brooklyn. As Mark Brown in The Guardian points out, the author he is "something of a bridesmaid" where major awards are concerned, with many near misses in major literary prizes.

Brooklyn is described as :

... a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York

and the judges called it :

Poised, quiet and incrementally shattering - we all loved this book and can't praise it highly enough.

Read more about the book here. The Guardian has an extract from the novel up, here, and you can read reviews here, here, and here.

The first novel award was taken by Raphael Selbourne for Beauty which the judges said :

Captures the raw humanity of inner city life with extraordinary authenticity.

The novel, which marks another success for the independent Tindal Street Press, is about :

... a naive young Bengali woman living in Wolverhampton who finds herself ostracised by her family after a failed arranged marriage.

You can read more about it here and here.

Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man his life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; while Patrick Ness won the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer.

Literary Winners

Have to some catching up to do with letting you know about recent winners of literary prizes. Petina Gappah has won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award for her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly. Claire Armistead, chair of the judges, praised the books as a:

...humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe

You can enjoy the first lines from each story on Petina's website, and read about her feelings on winning the prize on her blog. Debut novelist Evie Wyld beat some pretty fierce competition (including Booker winner Aravind Adiga and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is :

... set in eastern Australia and tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things that they will never know about each other.

PddQ8xLinAc >Louise Doughty, chair of Judges, described the novel as :

... a remarkable book. A sometimes poignant, sometimes comic story of a father and son who have so much in common but never quite connect, it is awash with fine images that linger in the mind. Wyld’s choice of subject matter is both brave and wide-ranging, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to the back country of Eastern Australia, Wyld captures the inflections of male speech and male bonding in a way that feels both acute and realistic. Most importantly, she writes brilliantly, able to paint a picture or create a convincing encounter with a few deft, evocative strokes, in a prose style worthy of our very best writers. There is nothing 'first novelish' about this first novel. It's a fantastically mature book, never showy, a slow burn that drags the reader in.

Wyld was one of Granta's Voices of 2008, and you can catch her talking about her book on YouTube. Then there's the infamous Bad Sex Award in fiction, which I mentioned a few days back. This year it was won by Jonathan Littell. One extract from The Kindly Ones that the judges felt merited the award compares a woman's genitalia and :

a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.

But the award is all about schoolboy sniggering, suggests Oliver Marre in The Telegraph :

It is funny – and also quite satisfying – to see the winner of the Prix Goncourt tittered at like this but the fact remains that his description of sex wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t worse, say, than his description of love or violence when taken out of context.

David Hewson has a very good piece on his blog called Do We Need Sex in Fiction, which I think every potential novelist, wanting to avoid the pitfalls, should read.

Just Girls for Short Story Prize

The BBC announced an all-female line-up for its National Short Story Prize :

• Naomi Alderman's Other People's Gods
• Kate Clanchy's The Not-Dead and The Saved
• Sara Maitland's Moss Witch
• Jane Rogers's Hitting Trees with Sticks
• Lionel Shriver's Exchange Rates

Each story will be broadcast, starting December 4th, and you can sign up to be informed when the downloadable podcast is available so you can listen to it on the gadget of your choice.

More at The Guardian.

Costa Shortlists

The shortlists for the various categories of the Costa Prize have been announced, and here's the full list :

Costa First Novel Award

• The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
  
• John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
  
• Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
  
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
  

Costa Novel Award

• Family Album by Penelope Lively
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Costa Biography Award

• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
• The Music Room by William Fiennes
• Coda by Simon Gray
• Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead

Costa Poetry Award

• Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James
• One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
• Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid

Costa Children's Award

• Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
• Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
• Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

Two of the authors on the list, Simon Gray and Siobhan Dowd have been nominated posthumously.

More at The Independent, and you can find links to all the nominated books here.

The winners in each category will be announced on January 5th and the overall Book of the Year on January 25th.

Another Year of Bad Sex

Maybe Neil Gaiman got it succinctly right on Twitter a few hours ago :

Just read the Guardian Bad Sex Award contenders ... I may never write a sex scene ever again. O Roth. O Banville. Argh.

Yes, it's that time of year again when literary lust becomes fodder for fun. The Guardian has extracts from all the 2009 nominees for The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award which you can read at your peril. But those of you of a somewhat tenderer disposition may want to ignore the link. (I started down the list earlier but had had a surfeit of fictional bonking before I made it through all the contenders, so will resume later in the interest of - ahem - research. ) My question to you is, do you really think these are examples of bad writing about sex? The Roth extract, green dildo aside (!) i though pretty intriguing and I'm off to buy the book. I didn't snigger pruriently at Banville's :

... tang of fish-slime and sawdust ... .

Theroux's : '

Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.

is a rather sweet line I can hear being taken up as a reprise by his female readers and Richard Milward's, yes, IS funny - but that is his intention surely? The usual refrain on posts of this nature on my blog - sex is very difficult to write well anyway. Postscript : And that is the point made very well in Sarah Duncan's response on The Guardian blog :

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture.

Colum McCann Takes NBA Fiction Prize

The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories.

The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying city" by judges.

T. J. Stiles wins the non-fiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Keith Waldrop, the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Phillip Hoose took the Young People's Literature Prize for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Gore Vidal wins an award for distinguished contribution to American letters, while Dave Eggars wins the Literian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

This year there was also a bonus prize to mark the awards' 60th anniversary. The public voted online for the Best of the National Book Awards, and the winner was Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Finalists included books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty.

You can find interviews with all these authors and information about the books on the NBF website.

The Curious Intimacy of Strangers

The beauty of reading a book by yourself is how the author's imagination interacts with your own, in a way it doesn't if you're watching a movie. There's that curious intimacy of strangers. That's why I think this genre will survive.

Sir Salman Rushdie in an interview with Donna Seaman. The author received the Chicago Public Library Foundation Carl Sandburg Literary Award at a banquet in the Harold Washington Library on Thursday, October 15.

The National Book Foundation

The finalists for America's National Book Award were announced yesterday. These are the shortlisted fiction titles (because this is the category that interests me most) with links to further information about book and author :

Bonnie Jo Campbell - American Salvage
Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin
Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Jayne Anne Phillips - Lark and Termite
Marcel Theroux - Far North

Do check out the other nominees in the Non-Fiction, Young People's and Poetry categories on the National Book Foundation's website.

More about this year's nominations at Jacket Copy, and I will add as postscripts any other interesting links of the topic I come across.