Next by James Hynes has been named the winner of The Believer Book Award, and it was announced Friday that Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver took home the Best Translated Book Award. The book was competing with a shortlist of ten novels in translation.
Weekend Prizewinners
Booker Laureates
Last night I had the opportunity to attend part of a reading by the new Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre (he won for Vernon God Little), and Dan Rhodes, whose book Timoleon Vieta Come Home was shortlisted. Rhodes went first, mentioning that were he to purchase a star map, he would be interested only in finding Morissey’s house. He then read some super short stories from his “cult favorite,” Anthropology: and a Hundred Other Stories, which were charming and amusing in a Richard Brautigan sort of way. Here are four of them. Perhaps the high point was when he read some unpublished work, which turned out to be a story he wrote when he was seven. It was about a pop star/football star who “goes wee on everyone.” DBC Pierre, when it was his turn to read, offered this interesting nugget: he said that since he is a new writer he does not read very much for fear of corrupting his fragile writing voice — an odd sentiment, but one that I’m sure some writers can relate to.
●
●
Interesting Award
The Guardian has a story on an interesting literary award. The International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award starts out with nominations from 162 libraries all over the world, which makes for a huge and eclectic longlist. The list of nominations includes everything under the sun. Or you can check out which libraries in which countries like which books. It’s sort of like a lesson in literary geography. Baudolino by Umberto Eco is apparently favored to win. Out of the three or four books on the list that I’ve read my favorite was probably The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster.
●
●
Award Winner, New Book, Big Book
Edward P. Jones continues to receive accolades for his National Book Critics Circle Award. This AP article gives some more insight on Jones and his book, The Known World. Could a Pulitzer be around the corner? In the San Francisco Chronicle, a considerable profile of T. C. Boyle. It looks like Boyle’s next book will be called The Inner Circle. This one will be about Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a real life sex researcher from the 1940s and 50s. And the New York Times Book Review finally finished reading William Vollmann’s massive treatise on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, (weighing in at 3,299 pages) and makes the review its cover story. They appreciate the expanse of the work, but not so much the content.
●
●
The People’s Choice
Back in January I briefly made mention of something called the WHSmith Award. It’s a British award that is determined by public opinion. People vote from a list of nominated finalists to determine the best book of the year. After 148,000 votes cast, they have announced the winners in eight categories, including the latest Harry Potter in the fiction category, Brick Lane by Monica Ali for best debut novel, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer for travel books, and Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country?, in something called the “factual” category. So as not turn over complete control to the masses, the also give out an award called the “Judges’ Choice,” which was awarded to the American writer, Richard Powers for his dense critical favorite, The Time of Our Singing. As I said when I first found out about this award, I would be very interested to see the results of an American award determined by popular vote. A lot more Americans read than people think, so an astute businessperson could, in my opinion, do quite well creating an award like this to fill the void. Here are the complete results of the 2004 WHSmith Awards.
●
●