Category: words

The prominent literary prize narrowed its nominees to 20 writers — a mix of heavyweights and many new ones. And across the Atlantic, Richard Flanagan won Britain’s biggest award, the Man Booker Prize.

“Over the past two decades Elena Ferrante – a pseudonym, of course – has become one of her country’s most exciting and compelling contemporary literary voices. And, as her celebrity grows, so too does the guessing game surrounding her identity.”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the World War II prisoners forced by the Japanese to build “the Death Railway” in Burma, is a personal work for Flanagan, whose father was a survivor of that campaign.

“Slang’s literary origins are widespread and ever-expanding. Its social roots, however, are narrow and focused: the city. … London’s chroniclers had always noted the urban vocabularies, though none before the eighteenth century had rendered their discoveries lexicographical.”

“Plunging sales by Hachette writers on Amazon indicate that the retailer’s tactics have discouraged potential customers. A delay in shipping may not be censorship. But what if the book is hard or even impossible to find on Amazon, which sells nearly half the books in America?”

Peter Carey: “I find it unimaginable that the Pulitzer or the National Book award people in the United States would ever open their prizes to Brits and Australians. They wouldn’t. … The old Booker had a particular cultural flavour. … There was and there is a real Commonwealth culture. It’s different. America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.”

“There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as ‘Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?’ or ‘When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?’ and they’re just really good at prompting stories.”

“From Marguerite Duras, I learned that fragmentation is a way of breaking something so that it can describe something the whole cannot. From Christa Wolf, that inserting yourself and the circumstances of your life into a myth can transform the myth and your sense of yourself. I learned the power of prosody from Toni Morrison.”

“The Americans who turned up in the 1950s were escaping from a repressive society where homosexuality was outlawed. In Morocco, attitudes were much more relaxed and, provided they were discreet, Westerners could indulge their desires, without fear of harassment, with a limitless supply of young locals in need of money, and smoke an equally limitless supply of the local cannabis.”

“The US novelists Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler will have to beat the odds if one of them is to become the first American winner of the Man Booker prize, to be announced on Tuesday night in London.”