Deborah Eisenberg has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions.)
Eisenberg Wins the PEN/Faulkner
Booker list gets shorter
As has been noted elsewhere, the Booker shortlist was unveiled today. This year’s six book list has a lot of name recognition. Here are the shortlisters: The Sea by John Banville, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Accidental by Ali Smith and On Beauty by Zadie Smith.Of note: Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan don’t make the cut. I still like Ishiguro to win it, but the bookies have Barnes as the big favorite, Ali Smith as the longshot and everyone else bunched in the middle. You can track the odds here (if you’re into that sort of thing.)Additionally: The Guardian has analysis and excerpts.
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Amitava Kumar, Collector of Writerly Advice Distilled Into One Line
For years, Amitava Kumar has asked writers to sign copies of their books and add a line of valuable advice, "as a glimpse into that particular writer’s mind."
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How Writers Read Vol. 2
I’ve written before about The Believer‘s “How Writers Read” series, and now the second installment, which includes questions about guilty reading and the constant debate between short and long books, is online.
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Epic Fail Aces Its Lulz Studies
“While others … have explored the more serious contexts of online humor, particularly when it tilts into the grim and mean, in Epic Fail [Mark] O’Connell makes a useful addition to what I’ll refer to as Lulz Studies by attempting to put this variety of Schadenfreude in cultural-historical perspective.”
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The Congenital List-Maker
In true Seinfeldian fashion, Arthur Martine, the Victorian writer behind Martine’s Handbook of Etiquette, drew up a detailed taxonomy of the various species of bore. These include the Loud Talker, who “silences a whole party by his sole power of lungs;” the Malaprop, who masters the art of inappropriate conversation; and the Life-Sharer, who may be familiar to the Facebook addicts of today.