Turns out Americans aren’t the only ones who adore snark. The novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones has won the first Hatchet Job prize from the British website Omnivore for his blistering takedown of Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, By Nightfall. Mars-Jones beat out Geoff Dyer’s slam of Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. “It isn’t terrible,” Dyer wrote, “it’s just so…average.”
Hatchet Job Prize
Tuesday New Release Day
On shelves this week are Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, and a provocative new book by Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
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Penkov Takes the BBC ISS Award
East of the West author Miroslav Penkov is sitting pretty these days. The Bulgarian fiction writer recently nabbed the BBC International Short Story Award for his collection’s titular story, “East of the West.” With a purse of £15,000, this is the world’s biggest prize for short stories, though typically it considers work by British authors only. However this year, due to the 2012 Olympics, the field was expanded to include international writers. All five judges unanimously picked Penkov’s work over the nine other submissions. You can read an excerpt online courtesy of Google Books, and you can get a little more acquainted with Penkov’s themes on Picador’s Tumblr.
Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville
While reviewing Alfred Kazin's Journals, Christopher Byrd pays a visit to Brownsville and Kazin's boyhood home.
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The Library of Babel
Ronni Abergel has created a library of people, where users can borrow humans instead of books on any subject. The concept was launched in Denmark in 2000 and has since spread to more than 70 countries.
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We’re Gonna Make It
Recommended Reading: A chapter of Janice Shapiro's new graphic memoir Crushable, on the subject of the late Mary Tyler Moore.
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McGraw-Hill Split
Amid calls to change its strategy, McGraw-Hill Education is becoming a standalone business. The CEO has released a video explaining the move.
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