Booker Prize Offers Up Eclectic 2017 Shortlist

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September 13, 2017 | 6 books mentioned 6

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The Booker Prize has whittled down its longlist to an intriguing shortlist, and none of the authors tapped has previously won the Prize. This year, three Americans make the shortlist: Paul Auster, George Saunders, and Emily Fridlund. They are joined by the UK’s Ali Smith and Fiona Mozley, and UK/Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. The bookies suggest that Saunders is the favorite to win.

All the Booker Prize shortlisters are below (with bonus links where available):

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6 comments:

  1. Some great books on the shortlist, but I would love to have seen both Sebastian Barry and Mike McCormack in the final shake-up. Both excellent.

  2. Sadly, the two Irishmen mentioned by Eamonn should have had a place, but American’s are bumping out Commonwealth writers. I remember long ago my book seller expressing his disdain for book prizes and his feeling of awkwardness having to attend an event he believed held no value. This was while I was still excited by the Booker. This shortlist is so disappointing, I am pretty much done. I thought with Sarah Hall being a judge there may be hope, but nope. At least Ali Smith was acknowledged. BTW, I love American writers, my concerns have nought to do with that.

  3. I agree, it is unfortunate Sebastian Barry is still not in the running. He is so gifted, and “Days” is one of his best novels yet. Highly recommended.

  4. I was rather surprised to see Saunders on the list (regardless of what country he’s from, although for the record I didn’t think they needed to expand the Booker beyond the commonwealth either). Everything I’ve heard and read about that book is that it’s a little herky-jerky and a rather classic example of a short story writer trying on the form of the literary novel for the first time. I consider myself a pretty scholarly person in touch with the literary world at large, but I haven’t heard a single person rave about this book, as opposed to Tenth of December, which a good dozen people pushed on me or strongly encouraged me to read (and which I agree is quite marvelous).

  5. Cecil, you must be living in a cave. He just won the National Book Award, and he has been well reviewed in countless publications…

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Prizes

Geniuses 2006

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September 19, 2006 | 6 books mentioned 3 min read

The annual MacArthur “Genius” Fellows were named today. This award gives people from diverse fields $500,000 with “no strings attached,” for “exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances.” There are typically a handful of literary types among the scientists, artists, and musicians who become Fellows, with this year being no exception. George Saunders is probably the best known among them, but I’ve listed all of the literary winners below along with some relevant links:David Carroll – Naturalist Author/Illustrator – From the bio on his site: “David is an active lecturer and turtles/wetlands preservation advocate. His art and writing, as well as his extensive fieldwork with turtles and wetlands has been widely recognized, and been the subject of many feature articles.” He is the author of a recently published memoir, Self-Portrait with Turtles and “the wet sneaker trilogy” of The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections, and Swampwalker’s Journal.Atul Gawande is a prominent surgeon, but he is better known for his book Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science and his articles in the New Yorker, including “The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?”, “Piecework: Medicine’s money problem,” and many others. In my opinion, Gawande’s best quality is his ability to bring his perspective as a surgeon to his stories. Nearly all of his articles start with an observation he has made on the job that he then investigates further. (In this respect, he’s not unlike another great medical writer Oliver Sacks.) Other links: A Slate diary Gawande did in 1997; Gawande’s 2005 commencement address at Harvard Medical SchoolAdrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family was an incredible work of journalism. To write the book, she spent ten years following the lives of an extended family in the Bronx to paint a detailed portrait of the lives of people that don’t get typically get such attention in the press. In an interview with Salon from 2003 (you have to watch an ad to read it), LeBlanc explains what she discovered while writing the book. See also: a recent article by LeBlanc on child actors in the New York Times Magazine, reprinted here.David Macaulay is the illustrator and author behind those incredible “The Way Things Work” books. In them, he deconstructs everyday objects as well as big buildings and other structures in engaging, lighthearted, yet incredibly detailed illustrations. You can see a few of those illustrations here. Macaulay is probably best known for The Way Things Work, but his architectural books, like Mosque are fascinating as well.I can’t pretend to know much about Sarah Ruhl – theater is a blind spot for me – so I’ll point instead to this long and glowing profile from the Washington Post: “She has been writing and rising steadily ever since, creating plays that aren’t easy to categorize. (An anthology of her plays will be published this fall.) The Clean House is tight and funny, skirting the polemics you might expect from a scenario that begins with a demanding WASP doctor and her recalcitrant immigrant maid. Yet it deepens by sly degrees, sweeping the audience on a surprising cloud of feeling as the characters deal with terminal illness in unorthodox ways.”George Saunders likely needs little introduction here as he’s been a favorite at The Millions and on many other book blogs. He is known for his unique, dystopian yet bleakly funny style that somehow manages to capture everything that is weird about our world without being obvious about it. For more George Saunders fun, check out an interview at Identity Theory, his story “Adams” from the New Yorker (there’s more where that came from), or his books, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and In Persuasion Nation.

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| 6 books mentioned 3 min read
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The 2014 Pulitzer for Fiction Goes to Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch

Prizes
April 14, 2014 | 6 books mentioned

Following last year’s win for The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson’s novel of North Korea, the Pulitzer jury named Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch this year’s winner in the fiction category. The Son by Philipp Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis were the other finalists for the fiction prize.

Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:

Fiction:

Winner:  The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (excerpt, Adam Dalva’s essay on the novel, casting the upcoming movie)
The Son by Philipp Meyer (our review, our interview with Meyer)
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis (excerpt, an essay by Martha Anne Toll)

    

General Nonfiction:

Winner: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass (excerpt)
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan (excerpt)

 

History:

Winner: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 by Alan Taylor (review)

A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America by Jacqueline Jones  (excerpt)
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser  (excerpt

 

Biography:

Winner: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall 

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch (excerpt)

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber 

 

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

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Lists Prizes

The Prizewinners

Lists Prizes
October 23, 2005 | 6 books mentioned 4 min read

The list at the end of this post is arbitrary. Necessarily so, because awards, by their nature, are arbitrary. Nonetheless, after a couple of weeks full of awards news, including the inaugural appearance of the Quills, I was curious to see if all these awards are really pointing us towards good books.If we are dissatisfied with the Booker Prize or the National Book Award or the Pulitzer, the Quills, which casts the net very wide and relies on voting from the reading public, have been presented as a populist alternative. The results are less than satisfying. It is not news to anyone that the reading public likes Harry Potter and books by Sue Monk Kidd and Janet Evanovich. I hold nothing against those bestsellers, but naming them the best books of the year does little to satisfy one’s yearning to be introduced to the best, to have an encounter with a classic in our own time. We like those bestsellers because they entertain us, but while monetary success is the reward for those entertaining authors, awards have typically honored books with qualities that are more difficult to quantify. These award-winners are supposed to edify and challenge while still managing to entertain. But, as we saw with last year’s National Book Awards, readers are unsatisfied when recognition is reserved only for the obscure. We want to know our best authors even while they remain mysterious to us. So, pondering this, I wondered which books have been most recognized by book awards in recent years, and could those books also be fairly called the best books.It turned out to be a challenge. I wanted to include both American books and British books, as well as the English-language books from other countries that are eligible to win some of these awards. I started with the National Book Award and the Pulitzer from the American side and the Booker and Whitbread from the British side. Because I wanted the British books to “compete” with the American books, I also looked at a couple of awards that recognize books from both sides of the ocean, the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The IMPAC is probably the weakest of all these, but since it is both more international and more populist than the other awards, I thought it added something. The glaring omission is the PEN/Faulkner, but it would have skewed everything too much in favor of the American books, so I left it out.I looked at these six awards from 1995 to the present awarding three points for winning an award and two points for an appearance on a shortlist or as a finalist. Here’s the key that goes with the list: B=Booker Prize, C=National Book Critics Circle Award, I=International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, N=National Book Award, P=Pulitzer Prize, W=Whitbread Book Award, bold=winner11, 2003, The Known World by Edward P. Jones – C, I, N, P9, 2001, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – C, I, N, P8, 1997, Underworld by Don DeLillio – C, I, N, P7, 2004, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst – B, C, W7, 2002, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – I, N, P7, 2001, Atonement by Ian McEwan – B, N, W7, 1998, The Hours by Michael Cunningham – C, I, P7, 1997, Last Orders by Graham Swift – B, I, W7, 1997, Quarantine by Jim Crace – B, I, W6, 2004, Gilead by Marilynn Robinson – N, P5, 2003, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard – I, N5, 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey – B, I5, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon – C, P5, 2000, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood – B, I5, 1999, Waiting by Ha Jin – N, P5, 1999, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee – B, C5, 1999, Being Dead by Jim Crace – C, W5, 1998, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott – I, N5, 1997, American Pastoral by Philip Roth – C, P5, 1996, Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge – B, W5, 1996, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser – N, P5, 1995, The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie – B, W5, 1995, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker – B, W5, 1995, Independence Day by Richard Ford – C, P5, 1995, Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth – N, P4, 2004, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – B, C4, 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali – B, C4, 2003, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor – B, I4, 2003, The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut – B, I4, 2003, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins – N, P4, 2002, Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry – B, I4, 2002, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor – B, W4, 2001, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – B, I4, 2001, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett – I, N4, 2001, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead – N, P4, 2001, Oxygen by Andrew Miller – B, W4, 2000, The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins – B, I4, 2000, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro – B, W4, 2000, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates – N, P4, 1999, Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan – B, I4, 1999, Headlong by Michael Frayn – B, W4, 1999, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin – B, I4, 1997, Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid – C, I4, 1997, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty – B, W4, 1997, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan – I, W4, 1997, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick – I, N4, 1996, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood – B, I4, 1995, In Every Face I Meet by Justin Cartwright – B, WI find the list to be fairly satisfying, especially at the top, though it does skew in favor of men. There are also a preponderance of “big name” literary authors on this list, but it begs the question: Does the fame come first or do the awards? I’d love to hear other opinions on this list, so please, share your comments.See Also: Award Annals compiles similar lists (though much more comprehensive than this one.)

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The Rooster: A Judge’s Notes

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March 26, 2009 | 6 books mentioned 5 3 min read

My moment in the Tournament of Books spotlight has come and gone, but I’ve enjoyed following the series throughout. It’s been particularly interesting, from the perspective of a “judge,” to see how the other judges have responded to the books I read.The Lazarus Project got surprisingly little ink during its run. I suspect that the book was something of a trendy pick for those following the Tournament. Aleksandar Hemon has a compelling back story and not long ago joined the elite ranks of young, literary superstardom like Jonathan Lethem, Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, and David Foster Wallace in winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. I had actually read The Lazarus Project last summer (and was all set to write a review then – I’m glad I held off), and I felt lukewarm about it at the time. In her first round judgment, Monica Ali noted “the narratives simultaneously unfolding and folding up on themselves,” and that was what stood out to me much more in my second reading of the book. In rereading it, I caught more threads to the story, and the ending, even though I knew it was coming, hit me harder.But I still wasn’t entirely won over. In his commentary on the first round match, John Warner pretty much hits the nail on the head, “I got the sense in reading that Hemon was also fascinated by the Averbuch story, but at some point became more interested in his own fascination than in Averbuch himself.”For my match, meanwhile, Lazarus didn’t merit much attention from the commentators. Instead the focus was on Shadow Country (which, like that other Frankenstein of the Tourney 2666) gave pause because of its heft and peculiar path to publication. As I was reading the book I was a bit thrown by that as well – Shadow Country is really three books, all previously published, cobbled back together and revamped by Peter Matthiessen. At times, it really did feel like three books smashed into one package, particularly, as I noted in my ToB piece, when I began the book’s third part and, poised to read another retelling of Edgar Watson’s life, I felt the whole thing growing a bit tiresome. Luckily, the third part of the book is stunning, and it ultimately won me over. In the end, I felt that the book stood well as a repackaged whole in that it heightened its obsessiveness and highlighted the complexity of Matthiessen’s Watson. In the long book, the reader is given the opportunity to peel back layer after layer of Watson, until finally only Watson’s own voice is left. This was where the book derived its power.Interestingly, though, it was the repackaging that was the main focus of the Shadow Country discussion during the ToB, and it was ultimately the cause for its departure. The two commentators were quite ambivalent about it. In his commentary on my judgment, John Warner posited a question: “I ask, rhetorically, if any of the sections of Shadow Country were in the tournament individually, would they have even sniffed the semis?” In the commentary on Junot Díaz’s judgment, Warner writes “I don’t think we’ll be seeing any passionate blog postings or comments protesting the bouncing of Shadow Country from the tournament.” Meanwhile Díaz bounced the book for the quite credible reason, in my opinion, that he had previously read the three original parts of Shadow Country. I know that for me, having already experienced the three parts of as discrete stories would have robbed Shadow Country of its weightiness and obsessive power. This seemed to be what happened for Díaz.It’s rare that I get a chance to read along side other readers like this, and its hard to think when I might ever have the opportunity to write in this way alongside others about the same books, but it definitely added to my reading experience.

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