Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck’s Report has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The book was released in the U.S. as Brodeck and sounds mighty intriguing.
Claudel Wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Order Some Donuts
Next week marks the release of Jordan Ferguson’s 33 1/3 book on Donuts, J Dilla’s legendary instrumental hip-hop album. Over at Stones Throw, you can dive into an excerpt. I recommend doing so while bumping “Last Donut of the Night” in the background.
For the Squares
“To use the lingo of their era, these novels are square. The protagonists have names like Jane and Barbara; they are not the misfits of which much teen literature is made but instead fundamentally good girls who long to fit in, and usually do … Viewed through the lens of contemporary culture, and especially contemporary teen lit, these girls should be boring and shallow. But Beverly Cleary’s supposedly ordinary girls are complex: resentful of their mothers one moment and sympathetic toward them the next, willing to do anything for one special boy but indignant when they’re taken for granted.” On the unexpectedly complex nature of Beverly Cleary’s boring protagonists with Ruth Graham at Slate.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Koch; Shin; Henríquez, Foulds, Walsh, O’Neill; Dybek
New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez; In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.
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New Romance
Recommended Reading: A new story by Yuri Herrera for Granta Magazine, featuring “the prayer of the overheated-horndog”: “Oh please, oh please, oh please / May he, the drunken me / May he, the dumbfuck me / May he, the me who never ever ever knows where shit is / May / he have saved one / Just one / Lubricated or corrugated / Colored or flavored / Magnum or tight-fit / Oh please / Holy Saint of horndogs / Grant me just one condom.”
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Feel the Tingle?
Recommended Reading: On Chuck Tingle, self-published writer of gay erotica, who beat the notorious Sad Puppies at their own game: “Question: If you could pick a single writer to make an effective, compassionate statement about identity politics to a divided literary community, who would you pick? Would it be a schizophrenic, autistic person who’d authored an e-book called Space Raptor Butt Invasion?”
Something Simple
“When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories.” Electric Literature has posted Ben Marcus‘s “paean to the contemporary American short story,” which doubles as the introduction to New American Stories and does a pretty good job of capturing just what it is we love about reading fiction.
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New Morrison Novel
Toni Morrison fans, rejoice! She has a new novel coming out in April, titled God Help the Child.
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On the Stupidity of Entitlement
Year in Reading alumna Ottessa Moshfegh has a new story in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, titled “The Beach Boy.” Moshfegh also spoke with Deborah Treisman about her writing: “Isn’t it hilarious when people are blind to their own arrogance? For some, no amount of American liberal-arts education, charitable contributions, or hours spent listening to NPR will ever wake them up to their own privileged, bigoted, and classist attitudes. […] One might say that New Yorkers like the folks in ‘The Beach Boy’ are especially susceptible to the kind of stupidity I love to write about—the stupidity of entitlement.”
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