The 87th annual California Book Awards, which “recognizes the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of literature written in California,” announced this year’s finalists. The nominees include Rachel Khong‘s Goodbye, Vitamin, Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s The Refugees, and Zinzi Clemmons‘s What We Lose (here’s the full list). From our archives: The Millions’ interview with Khong.
87th Annual California Book Awards Finalists
2015 Tournament of Books Winner Announced
After five rounds, sixteen books and more hard choices than we can count, The Morning News has chosen this year’s champion of the Tournament of Books. Who won, you ask? (Here’s a hint: we’re pretty happy about it.)
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Dinner with Mr. Koch
“I don’t want to write ‘funny’ books where we all have to laugh our heads of all the time. The humor should come from behind, where we don’t expect it. And the life of a well-known writer is something you can laugh about quite easily.” On the occasion of his new novel Dear Mr. M, our own Claire Cameron interviews Herman Koch over at Salon.
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Are You There God
As part of his ongoing campaign to atone for his sin of helping Trump, ghostwriter Tony Schwartz is consulting for the Clinton campaign. And dear god if ever we’ve wished a writer well, it’s now.
Lish’s Legacy
Gordon Lish is famous for being Raymond Carver’s very involved editor, but his work has never been thoroughly considered before. David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli have set out to change that with a roundtable discussion of Lish’s legacy. “What can we learn from Lish? Well, we can take away a set of techniques, to be sure; ‘rules,’ if rules are useful to us. But we can also salvage something that looks almost lost in our time: a sense of the real, lived stakes of writing, its risks and its rewards.”
“This is the biography of a book.”
NPR has an excerpt from The Most Dangerous Book, Kevin Birmingham’s look at “the battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
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Read Russia 2012
Read Russia 2012 aims to celebrate contemporary Russian literature and book culture, and they’ve scheduled a bunch of events in the NYC area to coincide with next week’s BEA. You should certainly check them out, as well as NYRB Classics’ ongoing coverage of their own Russian literature highlights. (You can get even more information over here, too.)
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“The Realest Language”
Recommended reading: The Awl takes a look at the “attempt to create a completely logical, absolutely universal language,” which goes about as well as you’d expect (read: not very).
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