Herta Muller:another surprise Nobel Prize winner in literature

When Austria's Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, most had asked, Jelinek who? The same question is now being asked about this year's winner German writer Herta Muller. Like Jelinek before the Nobel, she is an obscure, virtually unknown writer - even neglected in Romania, her own country.

One of the beauties of the Nobel Prize is that the Nobel Committee has almost always picked up a truly real writer for the Prize, irrespective of his/her country, language and popularity. Without the Nobel, we would have never known Elfiede Jelinek or Orhan Pamuk.

At a time when everything gets to be dumbed down - and lierature is being frowned on and cornered - it's truly a great job for the Nobel Committee to ignore the market forces in selecting its winner.

Jelinek impressed me hugely despite her bleak complexity. I hope I would also like Herta Muller who "depicts the landscape of the the dispossessed".

Hilary Mantel wins the 2009 Man Booker Prize

The 2009 Man Booker Prize to Hilary Mantel is sure to delight the fans of historical fiction. Wolf Hall is a narrative set in sixteenth century, and about the rise of Thomas Chromwell - the blacksmith boy who became Henry V111's right-hand man. Sure there are many takers for such stories, including our Booker judges, but literary fiction gets a jab this time. Watch out: historical fiction is coming back!

Hilary Mantel interview

Who will win Man Booker Prize this year?

Tomorrow is the D-day. Of the six short-listed writers, only one will win the Man Booker Prize. And it's simply impossible to guess the winner. The prestigious Prize has been with us for forty years, and it's a big brand now - second only to the Nobel Prize. But you can always question about its selection process.

The process is arbitrary from the start: novels can be submitted for the prize only by publishers. Authors cannot enter their own books. Each publisher is allowed to submit two titles. (Past winners are automatically considered, and judges can call for a few titles.) Gossip networks claimed that Rushdie made it a contractual obligation for his publisher to submit The Enchantress of Florence. What of writers like Yann Martel (winner, 2002), whose The Life of Pi was a first book? Would it even have been submitted for the prize if, instead of a small press in Edinburgh, the book had come out from a monolith dominated by literary superstars? Another debut, Adiga’s The White Tiger (winner, 2008), was published by an independent press with a small list — one reason it was submitted for the prize at all.

Too Many Aspiring Writers in India

Anita Desai, the well-known novelist, has an interesting article in the Guardian on aspiring writers from India.

By the number of manuscripts that arrive daily and hourly from India on the desks of British and American agents and publishers, I would guess no country has more aspiring writers than ours. While it is curious - and a little sad - that writing only became a "respectable" profession once it began making money, it is very gratifying to know that a young, talented person can make such a choice today and not be consigned to "loser" status. It is actually possible at last to make a living by writing, to be self-supporting and thus self-respecting. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough. As long ago as 1929 Virginia Woolf knew this and wrote of it in her seminal A Room of One's Own

Twitter-ized novel gets a book deal

When Matt Stewart started posting his novel - literary fiction - on Twitter, I congratulated him for the sheer novelty of using a social networking tool for a serious pursuit. I'm now enormously happy that he has just landed a book deal with Soft Skull.

Denise Oswald, the Soft Skull editor, has this to say: The manuscript drew my attention initially. I thought Matt handled the twitter campaign brilliantly. It was the right time for something like that and he had the vision to jump on that opportunity. I think you'll see a lot of writers following suit but I'm doubtful it will be to the same effect, unless they can find a way to make that kind of broadcast their own.

Congratulations once again, Matt!

Unpublished: Old man and the Sea

Do you remember reading the Hemingway novel Old Man and the Sea? I read it in my school days, and still remember the old fisherman going out to the sea to catch his fish everyday, day afer day, but without any success. What determination and grit!And what a great subject for a novel!

Life has now published a series of pictures online about the great novel's setting, and Hemingway's writing habits. ( Link from Donigan Merritt)

Future of Literary Fiction

Future of literary fiction is now being discussed and written about in various journals and forums. A few days ago the Salon had an article Glenn Beck is the future of literary fiction. Now, in the ongoing 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival, one T. Cooper has said, "The future of literary fiction is co-writing vampire and/or zombie novels with famous directors."

Censorship in Frankfurt Book Fair!

Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, scheduled from Oct 14 to 18, will have China as its guest of honour this year, but the organisers faced a unique problem this time. Uninvite those authors, said China as one of its pre-conditions, or we would pull out altogether.

The authors included Dai Qing, the well-known investigative journalist and environment activist, Hang Hui, professor of Humanities at Tsinghua University and a pioneer of government-critical "new left" in China, and Bei Ling, poet and political commentator, who lives in exile in the USA.

Shame the organisers have followed the directives from China, and don't want the authors they invited first to attend the fair. Which virtually means they have become a party to gagging the free speech. Ha!

Now, are you still interested in this year's Frankfurt Book Fair?

Man Booker 2009 Shortlist announnced

It's six books this time, out of a longlist of thirteen. A.S.Byatt, J.M. Coetzee,Adam Foulds,Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawar and Sarah Waters have been shortlisted.

Byatt and Coetzee are veterans, Byatt winning the Booker Prize once(1990) and Coetzee twice(1983, 1999).

Sarah Waters was earlier shortlisted twice.

Adam Foulds is the youngest in the list, being only 34.

Bahaa Taher Profile

The National publishes an interesting profile of Bahaa Taher, the iconic Egyptian novelist, now 74, who recently launched his latest novel Sunset Oasis.

“I am still against the same things I was against when I was young: social and political injustice, especially against women or people of different origins or ethnicities. What’s different is that the hope I had at one time no longer exists. Hopefully things will change – but not, I think, very quickly.

Northeastern Indian writing today

Tehelka has published in its current issue a supplement on Northeastern Indian writing today(an odd topic for a newsweekly, but Tehelka famously takes on such issues)

"..Life in the Northeast (as elsewhere) is not all bleak, tragic or violent. There is love and hope in the human spirit. There is the serenity of the region’s mountain streams and the immense silence of its forests. Writers like Esther Syiem, Temsula Ao, Kynpham Nongkynrih and Mamang Dai are moored in their traditions, giving their writings a certain depth. But Ao feels that younger voices from Meghalaya and Nagaland — more urban, cosmopolitan, “westernised” than an earlier generation — have lost touch with their roots. Manipur has a strong tradition of theatre and dramatic writing spanning cities and villages. Many members of an energetic rural Womens’ Writers Group, led by writer Binodini Devi, have published books. In Mizoram, where writers earlier wrote on insurgency, they now write of the Church. There is also a definite desire to go back to a time before Christianity, to discover their roots. First apparent in Mizo music, this is now beginning to be felt in writing as well."

Mario Bellatin Interview

PRI's The World interviews "Beauty Salon" author Mario Bellatin.
Q: You have referred to literature as a “game.” Does your subversion of literary tradition owe anything to writers from the 1960s or later? Do you see yourself as a “post-modern” writer?

A: I still don’t understand very well what people call post-modernism in literature. And in spite of not understanding it, I have seen it come into the world and die as a term many times. That’s why I think it’s something dangerous. It has the capacity to accommodate to any kind of situation that in some way escapes a more traditional canon. The only thing I believe in relation to this topic is that literature can’t be something that doesn’t move, something static, as certain literary studies pretend to approach it. Literature must be in constant motion, forward and backwards, discovering again what has already been discovered, and plowing fields it’s supposedly not concerned with. In a way, I believe that each writer must reinvent writing, begin from the presupposition that there was no one preceding him or her, perhaps only the sacred phrase, now so trite, which states that first there was being.

Future of Fiction?

"The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century. "
Do you agree?

James Kelman Frisson

James Kelman, Scotland's only Booker Prize winner, is in his 70's, but he can still speak up his mind with great aplomb.

"If the Nobel Prize came from Scotland they would give it to a writer of f****** detective fiction, or else some kind of child writer, or something that was not even new when Enid Blyton was writing the Faraway Tree, because she was writing about some upper middle-class young magician or some f****** crap."

'Inherent Vice' Review

Tedious, Shallow, Monotonous, Flippant..

While I fully appreciate Pynchon in the abstract, as a literary-historical juggernaut—a necessary bridge from, say, Nabokov (with whom he studied at Cornell) to David Foster Wallace—sitting down with one of his actual books makes my eyebrows start to smolder. I find him tedious, shallow, monotonous, flippant, self-satisfied, and screamingly unfunny. I hate his aesthetic from floor to ceiling: the relentless patter of his Borscht Belt gags, his parodically overstuffed plots, his ham-fisted verbs (scowling, growling, glaring, leering, lurching) and adjectives (lurid, louche, lecherous), the tumbling micro-rhythms of his sentences, the galloping macro-rhythms of his larger narratives. I hate the discount paranoia he slathers over everything with an industrial-size trowel. I hate the cardboard cutouts he tries to pass off as human characters, and I hate—maybe most of all—his characters’ stupid names. (I even hate his name, which makes him sound like some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster.) I hate the fake song lyrics he invents for his characters to sing and the fake restaurants (Man of La Muncha) he invents for them to eat at and the stupid acronyms he invents for them to pledge their lives to.

In Support of Literature of Social Change

Call for Submissions for the Bellwether Prize

From the Press release
The Bellwether Prize supports the writing and publication of serious literary fiction addressing issues of social justice in culture and human relations, underlining the political power of literature. No other North American endowment or prize specifically supports a literature of social responsibility.

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level,creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger,” said Kingsolver. “Artists can be the bellwethers of social and moral progress. Think of Nadine Gordimer writing about race and power in South Africa, or Pablo Neruda writing with sarcastic, visionary wit about corporate imperialism in Chile. So many important novelists have written beautifully constructed social critique. We have that tradition in the U.S. as well, with John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath or Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. These are literary novels that argue eloquently for greater consciousness of human justice, and are also spectacular, enduring literature. But in the modern era, writers with this kind of vision do not find a lot of advocacy in our publishing industry.”

Adam Thirlwell interview

Adam Thirlwell made waves with his debut novel Politics six years ago. The British mini-Kundera, as he is sometimes called, has a new novel now.

Q:What are the roots of your own passion for literature?

A: Aged 13, on a summer holiday, I discovered poetry. In some terribly Freudian way, it was related to having my mother's attention. I discovered words could be so much fun without even understanding them. I've always been interested in words when they go a bit haywire and the sound and sense get dislocated. I was 18 and I'd gone to Prague and visited Kafka's house. I bought Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. I'd never thought of the novel as a poetic form. What I've got from Kundera is that a novel can be as playful as a poem. More and more, I think of writing as a way of creating your own map of the world, discovering what is possible, and describing a reality that is most Adamish. You can impose your own patterns on what is lacking in pattern. One of the games of writing is that some repeats are fruitful. It's also a game of constant contradiction.

Imre Kertész wins the Jean Améry Prize

Imre Kertesz, the 2002 Nobel Laureate, wins this year's 12-thousand- euro Jean Amery Prize sponsored by the Austrian Erste Bank and the Stuttgart publisher Klett-Cotta – which is conferred every second year at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"The oeuvre of Kertész as an essay-writer works on the basis of Enlightenment thinking, which has learnt the lessons of the barbarism of Fascism and Communism, and works for a Europe that will either become an enlightened and free Europe or it will not exist at all"

Times' Best 60 Novels of the past 60 Years

The times has published The best 60 books of the past 60 years to celebrate the Cheltenham Literary festival anniversary.

It begins with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and ends with The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. In between, you see lots of really good novels. But how is it that each year has produced only one good novel?

While I'm glad that Boris Pasternek, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, J.M. Coetzee and many other worthy writers are there in the list, I'm shocked Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago and Aleksandr Solshenitzyn don't figure at all. Shame, this omission!I knew they would not include Elfride Zelinek.

And a word about the titles. Why Love at the time of Cholera in stead of One Hundred Years of Solitude? They could include both the titles.

And if you think A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is worth it, how can you not include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things?.

However, I admire this passage from Erica Wagner's introduction.

There will never be a single list, however, of “the 60 best novels of the past 60 years”; you can’t please all of the people all of the time. For what you love to read depends on who you are; what made you read it; where you were when you first discovered a book; who pressed it into your hand; what mood you were in the day you turned the first page; whether the scent of the pages reminded you of libraries past.

Return of short story

It is an enigma that even in these busy times readers opt more for novels than short stories. But things are changing, says Nilanjana Roy, an Indian writer-critic.

There are signs that the three-to-four decade-long obsession with the novel at the expense of the short story might be changing. Some of this has to do with the power and clout exercised by better-established writers; some of this has to do with the influence of major prizes, such as the Man Booker International and the Pulitzer. And, I hope, some of this may have to do with the changing tastes of the reading public; if publishing is faced with a growing demand for short stories, the industry can no longer hide behind the excuse that “short stories don’t sell”.