The Guardian‘s Books Blog is hosting a tournament to determine “The Great American Novelist,” and the list of the final 32 seeded contenders, as voted by the site’s readers, is enough to raise some eyebrows—not as much for who did make the cut as for who didn’t. Guardian readers, haven’t you heard of Richard Yates?
The Great American Novelist
Finding Frances
Recommended Reading: Laura Van Prooyen’s poem at The Missouri Review “Location: Frances.” “When I say Frances, I mean a woman. I mean/a place. The dead cling to the land.”
PDT Cocktail Book
With New Year’s Eve looming, LA Weekly is forgoing their usual cookbook of the week in favor of a cocktail book—The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and illustrator Chris Gall, the only beverage book that made it into their Best of 2011 “cookbook” list.
Good Luck
Your inner monologue is whip-smart. You can’t imagine life outside Manhattan. You’ve had multiple husbands, all of whom left you for other women. Is it possible you’re in a Grace Paley story?
●
●
4 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Tuesday New Release Day: DFW, Auster, LaCava, Lewis
Both Flesh and Not, a posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace essays, is now out in paperback. Also out: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster; a new paperback edition of Stephanie LaCava’s An Extraordinary Theory of Objects; and a new collection of essays by C.S. Lewis. For more on these and other great titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
●
●
“That’s Just My Life and It Seems Quite Normal to Me.”
●
●
Like a Career in the NBA
“The myth of the full-time writer is a perniciously sticky one—and it doesn’t help that once in a blue moon a J.K. Rowling does come along, thereby entrenching the cultural delusion that being a full-time writer is a thing that could realistically happen. But the truth is that being a full-time writer is basically just the literary equivalent of a career in the NBA.” Liz Entman Harper talks with seven writers about the struggle to balance writing with a day job, and those interviews pair well with our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s look at “Working the Double Shift.”
●
●
Just to be clear – the 32 shortlisted authors were chosen by the guy running the “tournament”. Readers are supposed to vote on the match-ups he has created. There was a discussion about who should be in the 32 but he made the final call.
Yes, the omission of Yates strikes me as egregious as well, but then the whole idea is pretty silly. Writer matchups (see also: Tournament of Books) are even more ridiculous then prize shortlists.
What, No Mailer?!!!!!!
No Fitzgerald, either.
Mailer (and Capote) were excluded on the basis that their non-fiction is inadmissable. Hence neither has the tournament creator’s required “4 strong novels” to compete thru all the proposed rounds.
I did say already that it’s a ridiculous exercise….
Fitzgerald is there, but he’s not a “seed” for some reason.