After losing funding last spring, the Orange Prize has experienced a rebirth, gaining new financial backers and changing names; it will now be known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Close Call
Celebrity Book Reviews: On the Rise?
As if it wasn’t tough enough for a book reviewer to get page space, now they’ve got to compete with Rob Lowe, Al Gore, and the silent half of Penn & Teller. Thanks, Grey Lady.
Some Wednesday Reading from Mr. Salesses
Recommended Reading: Matthew Salesses’ new story in the latest Guernica, “High Schools, or How to Be Asian American.”
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The Art of the Recommendation
Laura Miller at Salon reports on the fine art of recommending books – “too delicate a task to leave to e-commerce robots” – and the literary types who are now stepping in to offer their advice.
Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman, Baker, Dyer, Pierre, Wilson, Mukherjee, Grossman
In a big week for new releases, we have Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his blockbuster debut The Magicians; Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, reviewed here today; another new Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme; DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland; and Kevin Wilson’s debut novel The Family Fang (which one blurber calls The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Four of the five books above, incidentally, were featured in our big second-half preview. And out in a paperback this week are a pair of award winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.
Holiday links
Hope everyone’s holiday is going well. I’ll be putting up one or two more “Year in Reading” posts and then The Millions will most likely be dark until the New Year. But first, a couple of links:One of my favorite end of year lists is the bookfinder.com “Top 10 out of print books”: the main list and broken down into categories.Stephen King names his favorite reads of the year, including a forthcoming novel by A.M. Homes. His number one book, which he calls “the best mystery of the decade,” is LBC pick, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.Millions Flashback: Tis the Season
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Wordpocalypse
In the beginning, God died, and it was bad. Then the pun died too, and despair came over the people.
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