Helen Garner on book prizes

The trouble starts at the moment when you get the crazy idea that not winning a prize means you're no good. It doesn't mean that at all. I have been a member of several judging panels. I have witnessed the strange dynamic of their functioning. Forces that outsiders can't even conceive of are at work in those meeting rooms. Under all their beautiful intelligent reasoning, prize judges, like people in every sphere of action, are driven by unconscious urges. How could it be otherwise? They are not sphinxes, or oracles, or disembodied spirits. They are people, subject to moods, full of contradictions and unacknowledged emotions and thwarted longings of their own.

Self-publishing Vs Traditional publishing

Self-publishing is as much a lottery as traditional publishing. Each has benefits, each has pitfalls. I think the vast majority of people who self-publish do so because they don’t see any alternative way into publishing. Even if you find yourself an agent and get a publisher on board—which is hard enough—there’s still no guarantee of success.

Last Days of a Real Writer

Subimal Misra, the well-known Bengali writer, called me this evening. Before going to my clinic, I was watching news on the telly at that hour.

Just when I was trying to relocate who it was speaking, he said, "Mrinal-Babu, I'm Subimal Misra. How are you?"

I hurriedly muted my TV set and replied, "Hi Subimal-da! How are you? I hear you after a long time."

"I'm in a very bad shape. That's why I'm going to disturb you."

"What's the problem?"

"You know I've scores of diseases: diabetes, asthma, a pace-maker in heart. But right now I'm having severe cough with shortness of breath. Can you suggest some drugs for me?"

I didn't respond immediately. The fact is, he is unwilling to go to any doctor for whatever reasons. May be he doesn't like visiting any doctor at all. And then he lives alone in a tiny rented flat far far way in the south. He seldom goes down out of his flat. How he manages his day-to-day living, I don't really know. I've not seen him in years - some eight or so. The only bit of news that I get of him is from his translator V. Ramaswamy, who is my friend. Ramaswamy keeps regular contact with him and helps him whatever way he can. .

"Are you listening to me, Mrinal-Babu?"

His is a long tired voice, and I can gauge he's breathing with difficulty. He must have some respiratory infection.

"Well, Subimal-da, take down"

I see him scribbling the names of drugs.

"Thank you. Part 1 of the problem is solved. The second part remains: to buy he drugs from the medicine shop. Who would go to buy it? I've not gone out of my flat for last two months".

"What about your fans and friends?"

"They have all abandoned me."

Silence reigns between us for a long while.

"Have you heard from Ramaswamy recently?"

"Yes. His 21-year- old son has passed away. How sad! Have you seen the boy? Long ago Ramaswamy came to take me to a doctor.. The boy was in the car".

"Are you writing these days?"

"How can I stop? I breathe in my writing".

Read a Subimal Misra story (translated)
 

Lit News: Witold Gombrowicz diary to hit bookstores on May 23

Four decades after his death, the diary of Polish author Witold Gombrowicz which finally hits book stores in Poland later this month will offer an intimate glimpse of the literary giant who made no secretof his homosexuality.

And now digitized Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes' works will be published as E-books for the first time in US on the first anniversary of his death in Mexico city, according to PW.

Terrorism in Indian fiction | Politics in Literature

Terrorism in Indian fiction
 We live in a world petrified by the monster of terrorism. This will obviously reflect in fiction too. And it’s no surprise that Indian authors have jumped on to the terrorism bandwagon.  

 Politics in literature 
The raw material of writers is the entire world that we live in; a world that continuously shapes us as we in turn shape it, through our poetry or fiction. The writer is someone who has no choice but to be engaged with society, which means political engagement. Nothing escapes the snare of the political, big P or small p – it is about the price of bread, the paycheck you bring home, how you interact with neighbours or whom you choose to romance. You can rebel against the latter or hew your own path, but your choice will be shaped by political concerns, and those have always included religion, race or ethnicity, sex and gender. Today, perhaps, more than ever.

Philip Roth's latest honour

Philip Roth's latest honor was as much for what he has done for other writers as for his own work.

Roth received the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award Tuesday night. He was cited for such novels as "Portnoy's Complaint" and "American Pastoral," but also for his advocacy in the 1970s and 1980s for writers in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern bloc countries during the Cold War. PEN, in the midst of a weeklong "World Voices Festival," is an international writers' organization that defends human rights.

Western or Eastern readers

 I don’t believe in western or eastern readers as it’s a gross stereotype.

Kuwaiti Saud Alsanousi wins Arabic 'Booker' 2013

Kuwaiti writer and novelist, Saud Alsanousi has been announced as the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel Saq Al-Bamboo (The Bamboo Stalk). The prize is worth $50,000. The announcement took place at the Rocco Forte Hotel in Abu Dhabi during the opening of Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

Writing a good sentence | writers who have skin in the game

Writing a good sentence is having to hit the bull’s-eye each and every time. A sentence has to serve so many purposes. It has to provide forward momentum. It has to tell us what we need to know. It has to suggest character. It has to stand at a correct distance from the characters in order to let the reader know the authorial attitude. It has to have within it a kind of kinetic energy that reflects the book’s or a character’s tone. Its construction has to illuminate the larger preoccupations of the book. It has to be disciplined and cannot be beautiful for the sake of beauty. The rhythmic interplay between sentences determines length and sound, smoothness versus percussiveness, which words end one sentence and which begin the next.
--Marisa Silver.

I like fiction by writers engaged in trying to make sense of their lives and of the world in which they find themselves, writers who palpably have skin in the game, and this makes me particularly resistant to historical fiction.
--Jonathon Franzen

Paula Fox interview |The Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013:

Paula Fox interview
"So I always write about the place I am in, but I also invent. I don’t know what the invention is, for me it is a very inadequate word. Storyteller is better. I like it better. It probably dates back to the cave dwellers. One would get up and tell the rest a story. I follow that tradition.’"

The Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013:
"From satirists to humorists to sweeping epic-spinners, these writers have a command of language and their form which is simply astonishing. They show that the novel has a bold, brilliant future in Britain. I could not be prouder of the list." 

Read the list here

The 2013 Pulitzer Prixe for fiction goes to Adam Johnson

Awarded to "The Orphan Master's Son" by Adam Johnson (Random House), an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart. 

Related Post
ToB Rooster goes to Adam Johnson

Unhappy literary trends or manifesto of a new literary magazine

Not only the language but the ETHOS of the corporate world has taken possession of art and literature. Writers and artists must “brand” themselves (even cows understand the pitfalls of this). Poems, paintings, novels, and sculptures are start-up projects in need of investment. Imagination is, as ever, an unaffordable production cost.

Read the manifesto of SPOLIA,  new monthly literary magazine edited by Jessa Crispin

Latest Haruki Murakami novel on sale

                                   5,00000 COPIES SOLD IN HOURS
More than 100 people lined up atmidnight at a Tokyo bookstore, eager to get their hands on the latest HarukiMurakami novel that went on sale on Friday, the first in three years by theglobal bestselling author and Nobel prize favorite.

"From July of his sophomore year at college to January next year, Tsukuru Tazaki was living while mostly thinking about dying,"

Perihan Magden interview

My novels are auto-biographical in a psychological, even spiritual way. Therefore they are always very disturbing to work on. Even when they are finished I am not done with them. I always find them unbearable to read, to confront: both because of my endless dissatisfaction as an artist and because I feel like not wanting to listen to my own voice - like hearing a recording of my voice talking to a psychiatrist.

The 21 Books from the New Millenium Every Man Should Read

GQ publishes an interesting list of 21 novels of the 21st century. Of course, it's US-centric and far from being comprehensive. Anyway, I take delight in the fact that  it has included 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

Robert Silvers interview

We’re constantly struggling to master the flood.

A writer's sign of superior sensibility?

I see it as a sign of a superior sensibility that I can’t even read a bank statement.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala passes away at 86

For years, people who read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novels assumed she was born in India. She wrote about swamis, social climbers, duplicitous landlords and other characters from the Indian bourgeoisie who inevitably found themselves colliding with curious visitors from the West.
But Jhabvalawas a Westerner herself: a German Jew displaced by war to England, who married an Indian man and settled in his country. She absorbed enough of subcontinental culture to portray it with clarity and comic sensibility in books that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen

George Saunders quote

Justice is the most important thing in the world, and the birthright of all people. Especially for me and the people in my immediate circle. For people just outside my circle, I believe in it somewhat less, I suppose. For those way out of my circle, I am not necessarily against it, but tend to not fight for it very hard. For those as far out of my circle as one can possibly get, I am very much against justice. But it’s funny – as they move closer to my circle, I am more for it.