Independent Foreign Fiction Prize judging panel
They've announced the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Rosie Goldsmith, Antonia Lloyd Jones, Richard Mansell, Helen Oyeyemi, and Boyd Tonkin. The longlist for...
View ArticleAvelum review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Otar Chiladze's 1995 novel, Avelum: A Survey of the Current Press and a Few Love Affairs, which came out in Donald Rayfield's...
View ArticleMurakami picks up Welt-Literaturpreis
Not quite the Nobel, either cash- or prestige-wise (but, hey, Philip Roth did win it (2009) -- albeit six years after ... Jeffrey Eugenides), but the Welt-Literaturpreis has a decent list of...
View ArticleSelf-publishing Arno Schmidt
As I mentioned last week, I've released a little book, Arno Schmidt: a centennial colloquy. (I hesitate to say 'published' because it's not yet widely available via many distributors (currently...
View ArticleDaphne Awards
They've held the first Daphne Awards -- a great idea, reassessing the best books of 50 years ago (1963, for this first go) -- and they've now announced the winners. The fiction prize...
View ArticleNew old Georges Perec novel
In The Guardian Georges Perec-biographer David Bellos explains How Georges Perec's lost first novel has finally come to be published as Perec's Portrait of a Man is now coming out in English...
View ArticleBirth of a Bridge review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Maylis de Kerangal multiple-award-winning 2010 novel, Birth of a Bridge, now available in English from Talonbooks.
View ArticleJurek Becker's Jacob the Liar
I'm puzzled by a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article by Jochen Hieber looking back at the literature of GDR -- and making the claim that only one work of true 'world literature' was produced...
View ArticlePrize: Scotiabank Giller Prize
They've announced that Us Conductors, by Sean Michaels, has been awarded this year's Scotiabank Giller Prize -- with prize money that's been upped to C$100,000. See also the official...
View ArticlePrize: Schweizer Buchpreis
They've announced that Koala, by Lukas Bärfuss, has won this year's Swiss Book Prize, selected from 80 (unnamed ...) submissions (and note that the prize is only for written-in-German books)....
View ArticleThe Creator review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Mynona's (actually: Salomo Friedlaender) 1920 novel, The Creator, yet another nice (re)discovery from Wakefield Press.
View ArticleMark Polizzotti Q & A
At the Yale Books Unbound weblog they have An Interview with Mark Polizzotti, whose translation of their new three-in-one volume of Patrick Modiano -- reviewed separately here as Afterimage,...
View ArticlePrize: Science book
They've announced that Stuff Matters, by Mark Miodownik, has won this year's Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
View ArticlePrize: Business book
Surely there was never much doubt about what book would win this year's FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, but they had to go through the process and the motions; now the...
View ArticlePrize: Premio Carlos Fuentes
They've announced that the Premio Internacional Carlos Fuentes a la Creación Literaria for 2014 will go to Sergio Ramírez (the first one, in 2012, went to Mario Vargas Llosa). Worth...
View ArticleHoneymoon review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, one of the few Modiano titles in print in the US at the time of the...
View ArticlePrize: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize longlist
They've announced the longlist for the 2015 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, fifteen titles selected "from over seventy entries"; I'm afraid none of them are under review at the complete review.
View ArticlePrize: Bad Sex in Fiction shortlist
The Literary Review has announced the shortlist for its Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The Guardian helpfully presents the offending passages -- and gives you a chance to vote for your...
View ArticlePrize: Goldsmiths Prize
They've announced the winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the £10,000 fiction prize with the cringe-worthy tag-line: 'Fiction at its most novel', and it is How to be both, by Ali Smith,...
View ArticleIndian literature abroad
At Scroll.in Arunava Sinha argues that Indian literature must look beyond English to go global, suggesting it's time to: create a Library of India, comprising, say, translations of the 50 best...
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