#Literary prizes

[grandhotelabyss]

What's the best novel to win the Booker?

According to my official calculations, I have read about a quarter of the Booker-winning novels (and more like a third of Booker-winning authors). The ones I read were almost all good-to-great novels—except for Amsterdam; what were they thinking there?—so it's hard to decide. Midnight's Children, The Remains of the Day, Possession, Disgrace, True History of the Kelly Gang, Milkman...an embarrassment of riches, early and late. I even retain my stubborn undergraduate affection for The English Patient. I must get off my arse (they never should have started giving it to Americans) and read Oscar and Lucinda, The Famished Road, The Line of Beauty, The White Tiger, and, yes, Prophet Song next. (I've never read anything by Paul Lynch, but I like what he had to say here—very "romantic realism," though he calls it "cosmic realism.") The best of those I read? I have no argument against the critics who twice awarded Midnight's Children the Booker of Bookers; it's an exhilarating and world-historical tragic mock-epic. The two Coetzees are also undeniable and unforgettable contemporary classics. But I think for myself these days I have to go with The Sea, the Sea.

[nicolagriffith]

Spear shortlisted for Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

SPEAR is one of nine books shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

I’m just back from the UK and still jet-lagged—expect a blog post on that soon—but today I’m delighted to reveal that Spear is one of nine books shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. It’s a fine and interesting list: Wolfish, Christiane M. Andrews Arboreality, Rebecca Campbell Spear, Nicola Griffith Ten Planets, Yuri Herrera (trans. Lisa Dilllman) The Spear Cuts Through…

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #338

An end of week recap “Love is active, not passive. It is our love for one another, for Mother Earth, for our fellow creatures that compels us to act on their behalf.” – Laurence Overmire This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep…

[cupofteajones]

2022 Shortlist for Waterstones Book of the Year

2022 Shortlist for Waterstones Book of the Year

Waterstones, the UK Bookseller, released their yearly shortlist of this year’s best books of the year. The shortlist and award is selected by booksellers. If you are not looking to add more books to add to your TBR shelf, then reading this shortlist is highly unadvisable, you ‘ll have a hard time tearing your eyes away from these interesting blurbs: (more…)

[amicus-noctis]

“The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see.” ― Louise Glück, Vita Nova

Photo: from Andrei Tarkovskys "The Mirror" 1975

[alwaysbewoke]

[panimoonchild]

Every nation has its diseases, and Russia has an incurable one

Today Lina Kostenko, a symbol of Ukrainian literature, celebrates her 94th birthday. She is a sixties poet, writer, and dissident. Laureate of the Shevchenko Prize, the Antonovych Prize, and the Legion of Honor. In 1967, together with Pavlo Tychyna and Ivan Drach, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She never betrayed her beliefs.

The title of this post is her words.  I want to share with you some of her popular quotes:

[icantspellthings]

Is it obvious that english isn't my first language? Does the run on sentenced and zero grasp of grammar give it away? Is my sentences clunky and un-readable? Is my word choices weird and unsual?

Kinda feeling insecure about the way I write rn...

[wordshaveteeth]

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

- Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

[gracie-bird]

Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace receive the winner of Monaco's literary prize, Gilbert Cesbron, on May 5, 1962.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

An incisive, wickedly funny debut novel about a graduate student who decides to follow her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage) Helen is one of the best minds of her generation. A young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity, which could save the planet, Helen is torn when she discovers her brilliant advisor is involved in a sex scandal. Should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics that other schools have thrown out? Helen decides she must go--her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. Soon enough, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives--and maybe the world. Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out it’s not that hard--if you can run the numbers.

[wiltingdecay]

so uh. guess who's technically a published author now

[imunbreakabledude]

i gotta be honest it bugs me so much when books that are trying to be artsy or literary decide not to use quotation marks for dialogue. like yes you as a writer get to make any stylistic choice you want but unless your piece is about fucking with traditional english syntax as like, a major theme, it would be nice if you adhere to common standards that make reading easier

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #312

Winding Up the Week #312

An end of week recap “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.” – Clarice Lispector (born 10th December 1920) Meagre offerings, I’m afraid. It is proving to be a frenzied festive season with little time for literary link…

[ijustkindalikebooks]

New book in the collection.

[peanut-butter-and-theatre]

Guess what I’ve been reading

There's 29 fucking chapters and I'm only half way through the fucking 6th one