Who do you think would win the Nobel Prize in literature 2014?

Thursday (Oct 9) is possibly the day when the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 2014 would be announced. So, who do you think would win the Nobel this year? Who are you rooting for?

Every year around this time I rack my brain a lot speculating on the possible winner, but I never got it right. The only time I kind of hit was last year when I published a short list of four writers. The third name on my list won it.

Honestly, I have not invested any time or effort this year. For whatever reason, I find myself less enthusiastic and feel that there is less buzz and excitement around the Nobel Prize this year. You just have to visit the World Literature Forum to believe it. There are so many wonderful savvy readers of literature in there who passionately interact, debate and give their valued speculation in the forum. They are there this year too, but without that exclusivity or intensity.

One of the beauties about the Nobel Prize is that it has no long list or short list, and you have to speculate based solely on your reading of world literature and its trends. There is of course betting site like Ladbrokes, but you see some perennial contenders over there every year like Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth etc. The odds against writers are mostly made-up there and never reflective of literature’s best judgement. It does not make much sense to try to locate your future Nobel winner down there.

So who is my candidate this year? I want to play it safe this time. A writer with less established mainstream appeal is going to win the Nobel this time.

What do I base my prediction on? Please consider these facts. Coetzee was followed by Jelinek. Lessing by Le Clezio, Vergas Llosa by Transtromer. There is a pattern: if it's a well-known writer one year, it's sure to be a less-known writer the next year. It was Alice Munro last year - an established mainstream writer.  She is likely to be followed by someone less known, not from the mainstream, even an obscure writer. 

But then the Nobel Prize Committee always springs a surprise.

Recommended Reading: The Fringe of Reality

The Fringe of Reality by Antoine Volodine

The Trouble with Writing

The trouble with writing is that it’s a dynamic balancing act, we are always seesawing between concentration and interruption, grandiosity and despair.   The trouble with writing is that there are long dry stretches in the ugly stage, and the rewards, when they come, may not come when we need them the most. The trouble with writing is that even when some of our dreams and hopes and expectations do come true, they don’t relieve the difficulty of writing, or the solitude of writing, or the weird rollercoaster emotions of writing.
The trouble with writing is writing.
via The Millions

Business of Literature

Publishing has no particular ability to discern what is good or not, what is successful or not. This is true not just at the level of predicting commercial success, but also at predicting critical success. I already discussed great writers who almost vanished, books that slipped through the corporate-publisher cracks, and then between the indie cracks. If one could predict a Pulitzer Prize winner, why did Bellevue Literary Press end up with Paul Harding’s Tinkers, or Soft Skull end up with Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist that year too? If great editors could predict National Book Award winners, why did McPherson & Co. publish Lords of Misrule, or if editors could predict PEN Award winners, why did Red Lemonade publish Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen?
--VQR

What is innovative fiction?

One of the many goals of innovative fiction seems to be to rattle those received narratives, which is to say rattle those received structures. It does so, not simply to have fun (although there is almost always an element of the joyously ludic at play in the innovative), and not merely to examine its navel (although there is almost always an element of serious self-consciousness at play in the innovative), but rather to remind us that there are always profoundly important alternative ways to tell ourselves, our lives, our experiences of experience

Murakami on the game of literature

 "I think serious readers of books are 5% of the population. If there are good TV shows or a World Cup or anything, that 5% will keep on reading books very seriously, enthusiastically. And if a society banned books, they would go into the forest and remember all the books. So I trust in their existence. I have confidence."

Man Booker Prize 2014 shortlist announced

Man Booker Prize 2014 shortlist

Joshua Ferris (US) - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking)

Richard Flanagan (Australian) - The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus)

Karen Joy Fowler (US) - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Serpent's Tail) 

 Howard Jacobson (British) - J (Jonathan Cape)

Neel Mukherjee (British) - The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus)

Ali Smith (British) - How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton)

Hans Bolland refuses Pushkin award

"Every connection between him [Putin] and me, his name and the name of [Alexander] Pushkin, is disgusting and intolerable for me."

Hats off to you, Hans. By the way, Hans Bolland has brought some of Russia's greatest literary works to Dutch bookshelves.  

Autumn Feast of Fiction

The British book industry is responding with energy to the suggestion that ebooks have dumbed down their business. With a renewed faith in serious print content, the major publishing houses are to put their best men and women out in the field.

All big names: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Will Self, David Mitchell,Howard Jacobson, Murakami, Ali Smith, blah blah.

To be honest, I don't feel any excitement. I've only some interest in Martin Amis's "The Zone of Interest."

Ian McEwan for more novellas

"I will write, in my 70s, more novellas. I love the idea of sitting down to read something in three hours – about the length of an opera, or a long movie, or a play where all of its structure can be held in the mind. A novella is a great length, and it's a demanding genre in which things have to be settled quickly."

Mitchell-esque!

"... there’s no thesis without its antithesis. And there are times and places where proof can feel quite objective, I suppose. But with these great big philosophical questions, not really: They’re subjective. And they can vary throughout the course of a lifetime. You can be a fate bunny when you’re a teenager, but a hard-core free-will believer in your 60s, and even in the course of a single day."

U R Ananthamurthy quote

“It is said Somerset Maugham traveled the world with a notebook to learn the essence of life and Kafka sat in a room for the same objective. Yet Kafka came out with a better world-view."

--U R Ananthamurthy

 

Martin Amis has a new novel out in UK: The Zone of Interest

I wonder if Amis’s intention, in this relatively straightforward novel with some real-life characters thrown in, is to show the inability of language to write about the Holocaust at all.

Read a Subimal Misra story in English translation

Come, see India by Subimal Misra (Translated by V. Ramaswamy)

Reading stairway

If anything, genre fiction prevents engagement with literary fiction, rather than vice versa, partly because of the time it occupies, but more subtly because while the latter is of its nature exploratory and potentially unsettling, the former encourages the reader to stay in a comfort zone.

A letter from Amazon Book Team

Got this e-mail entitled Important Kindle request from the Amazon Book Team

Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read).  A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures.  And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com

Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com

Please consider including these points:

- We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
- Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
- Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
- Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

Thanks for your support.

The Amazon Books Team

Ursula K. Le Guin interview

My world is all I have to make my stories from, my people are the only people I know. But by making up worlds and peoples, I can recombine and play with what we have and are, can ask what if it were like this instead of like this—What if nobody had a fixed gender, as on the planet Gethen? What if marriages, instead of two people and one couple, consisted of four people and four homo- and heterosexual couples, as they do on the planet O? If nobody in a world had ever waged war, how would people and daily life in that world differ from ours, and in what ways?

Geoff Dyer attends a conference on Geoff Dyer

There should be an annual festival devoted to me.

Truly hilarious.

Evie Wyld interview

"I think writing should be a bit of a struggle. We’re not writing things that are going to change the world in big ways. We’re writing things that might make people think about people a little bit, but we’re not that important. I think a lot of writers think we are incredibly important. I don’t feel like that about my fiction. I feel like it’s quite a selfish thing at heart. I want to tell a story. I want someone to listen to me. And I love that, but I don’t think I deserve the moon on a stick because I do that."

Nabarun Bhattacharya passes away at 66

It's difficult to describe Nabarun Bhattacharya as a writer. He was kind of loose cannon, but firmly anti-establishment and wrote his poetry and fiction out of his conviction. A hard-core Marxist, with an in-depth knowledge of leftist movements and literature, he brought in a fresh wind of change in Bengali literature. He was original, intense, thoughtful, even provocative but never staid, dull or without a sense of humour.

Initially, I had problem with his odd-ball characters: most are lawless creatures, almost lumpens, some subversive, even schizophrenic. They use slang freely.But they were his sticks to beat his demons with.  His demons were capitalism, consumerist culture or powers-that-be. He had profound knowledge of the Kolkata sub-culture, which I think, he was  obsessive about and fond of, in a way.

I spent the better part of this summer reading his complete collection of novels. I read Kangal Malsat for the first time. Who can forget the fyataroos, the people who can fly and stay suspended in the air for a while, and wreak havoc with the administrative structure? It was awesome as a novel. I laughed out quite a lot while reading the novel. In the guise of a fantasy, it depicted the contour of our establishment in a brilliant way.

I don't know of any other living writer, not only in Bengali literature, but in world literature as well, who is so forthright, profound and talented.