Interesting Articles on Books, Authors, Reading, etc.... Sept./Oct 2009

Ummm . . . I thought it might be time to start a new thread here. However, I don't have an interesting article to post. I've been gallivanting for the last few days.

Not about books . . . exactly, but for those of you who like to drink a cup of hot coffee or tea, an item of interest from Der Spiegel.

This year's Royal Society for Science Book Prize was awarded today to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Today's Guardian has an article about the award:

Romantic adventurers win book prize

The paper reviewed the book last year:

Brave new world

First there was Napster, now this. I can't think of a writer more deserving of this fate . . . well maybe Stephanie what's her name.

And Kim Stanley Robinson is pi$$ed. Wooee, a cantankerous day in book land. The Swedes are also duking it out over the future of Swedish fiction.

A bunch of groups, columnists and writers are ticked off with the Booker judges: no science fiction, as urania pointed out, no Irish writers on the shortlist, no writers from African or Asian Commonwealth countries, no Canadian writers, etc. One of the judges responded to the criticisms on the judges' blog site yesterday:

Judges' blogs 2009

4 - How appropriate given LibraryThing just went pirate all over my computer :).

>7 janemarieprice: lol

Tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys:

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2009 - arrrrrrr you ready?

I found an article from the Guardian last year, on 10 of the best pirates in fiction:

Ten of the best pirates

I think I'll read The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe tomorrow, in honor of the day. A full text version is available on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=_B8eAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the...

#3 i'm defn. down w/ the Royal Society mates.

This article from today's New York Times falls in the "et cetera" category, but it will be of interest to anyone who has read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and The Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. The hospital where Lia Lee received her (Western) medical care, Mercy Medical Center in Merced, California, has recently adopted a policy where Hmong shamans are allowed to minister to patients in the hospital. The article briefly discusses Fadiman's book, the role of the shaman in and outside of the hospital, Hmong culture, and cross-cultural medicine:

A Doctor for Disease, a Shaman for the Soul

Thanks Darryl; as a fan of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, I will certainly look for that article.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle features a review of a new collection of short stories about first- and second-generation Chinese-Americans, All That Work and Still No Boys by Kathryn Ma:

'All That Work and Still No Boys'

More an advert perhaps, than an article, but intriguing -- http://www.ondemandbooks.com/the_ebm.htm

Anybody have $75k to invest so we could print and purchase all the OP books we've been dying to find and read? Of course, I suppose someone would have to transcribe them first. Maybe a 21st century scriptorium?

Danticat, Eisenberg, & McHugh win MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grants:

List of all winners:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ggNbiQP-VlkPXIsn38d89C8StWHgD9...

Background on the foundation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._and_Catherine_T._MacArthur_Foundation

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist...

How I Became a Famous Novelist

Interesting interview of a novel which seems hilarious.

Letters from Berlin: So Very Weimar

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/letters_from_berlin/so_very_weimar.php

Sad article about life in and out of poetry, in and out of New York.

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/new_york_new_york/goodbye_to_all_them.php

Madame Bovary goes interactive

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/05/madamebovarygoesinteractive/

The top 20 books of the Millenium

#20: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
#19: American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman
#18: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
#17: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
#16: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
#15: Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis
#14: Atonement by Ian McEwan
#13: Mortals by Norman Rush
#12: Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
#10: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
#9: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
#8: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
#7: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
#6: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
#5: Pastoralia by George Saunders
#4: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
#3: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
#2: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
#1: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

from http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/the-best-fiction-of-the-millennium-so-far-an-...

Yesterday's Guardian Review includes a review of Simon Mawer, author of The Glass Room, which is on this year's Booker Prize shortlist:

Simon Mawer: 'I'm a novelist. I don't want to tell the truth. I want to manipulate things as I choose. I want to lie'

Today's Sunday Telegraph features an article by Michael Prodger, the literary editor of the paper and one of this year's Booker Prize judges, on this year's offerings and the judging process:

Confessions of Booker Prize judge Michael Prodger

An obituary of the novelist Sarah E. Waters appears in today's New York Times. She wrote only one novel, This Child's Gonna Live in 1969, which was selected as an outstanding book for that year by the NYT. According to the article, "it portrays the lives of an impoverished black woman and her family in a Maryland fishing during the Depression. Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman's perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker." Although she didn't write any other novels, she led an active and rich life up until her death last month.

Sarah E. Wright, Novelist of Black Experience in the Depression, Dies at 80

Interesting article on "ethnic novels"

"Which got me thinking about the way in which international fiction is approached by far too many readers and reviewers. Why is it that when a book is written by a South Asian author and is set in a South Asian country, the reading public expects a dysfunctional stew of communal warfare, misogyny, and abject poverty? Why is it that even when the book is not a last-word on an entire culture but, like any "American" fiction, a story about a particular family, set of circumstances and time period, it is taken to be a definitive statement on the entire culture?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/the-ethnic-book_b_304500.html

Fanny,

I am missing something here. Do you mean to have a link in your post?

Damn, I'm an idiot. I blame the germ infested fellow who gave me a cold on the plane from Munchen. Fixed the post to include a link.

I found this 2006 New Yorker profile article of Hilary Mantel, which discusses Beyond Black and some of her previous works:

Devil’s Work: Hilary Mantel’s ghosts

NYRB review of Wolf Hall: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23250

>28 kidzdoc: And *drum roll* . . . Beyond Black is available through the special intercession of Baron von Kindle.

An amusing article about a dedicated reader, from today's New York Times,

An excerpt from the new translation of Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. It looks like it might be an interesting read. By the way, The Quarterly Conversation is one of the best online literature reviews out there.

For any Maurice Sendak fans, there's an interview with him and Spike Jonz about the book and film, Where the Wild Things Are in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/216997/page/1

Rebeccanyc -- great article. I don't think I could read 365 books in a year, but I'd sure read a lot more if I didn't spend so much time on LibraryThing!

Nickelini, you and me both! As for the article, I had to post on another thread that the article was by a metro NYC area reporter for the NY Times; hencle the local angle. Also, it helps to read short books!

Edited to fix typo.

Duelling Sarah Palin titles due soon?

Some stuff from the Guardian -

A review of Herta Mueller's The Passport and Nadirs - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/24/passport-herta-muller-book-review

"Presumably there is something going on in the German original that gives Müller's words greater appeal and colour. I know enough intelligent, cultured Germans who admire her work to suspect that something significant is being shed in the rendering."

And a fun quiz on Gothic Fiction just in time for Halloween: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz/2009/oct/23/gothic-fiction-quiz

For anyone who cares, I scored 6 out of 10, mostly through guessing. :)

Interview with AS Byatt: http://www.feministing.com/archives/018550.html

For New Yorkers: Dame Byatt is in the States promoting her new novel The Children's Book, for which she received a Booker Prize nomination. She'll be reading from it, and speaking about her work, this Thursday the 29th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Tickets are $10 is you're under thirty-five, and $19 for everyone else.

Tickets available here: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-TP5MS26

#38: If anyone will be in the Bay Area next week, she will be speaking in San Francisco as part of the City Arts and Lectures series at the Herbst Theatre. Unfortunately I will leave SF tomorrow, so I won't get a chance to attend. More info and tickets here:

http://www.cityboxoffice.com

38 - Also at the Strand on Wednesday the 28th at 7.

I am strongly tempted to go....

Why is contemporary Russian literature not getting translated into English, asks the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/oct/27/fiction-booker-prize

The Chinese poet Duo Duo is the winner of the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The World Literature Today magazine web site has a link to the press release here. I've included a summary below.

An international jury representing nine countries selected critically acclaimed Chinese poet Duo Duo as the 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international magazine, World Literature Today. The decision was made during deliberations on Oct. 22 on the OU Norman campus.

Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. He started writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated, midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and many of his early poems critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider’s point of view in a highly sophisticated, original style. Often considered part of the “Misty” school of contemporary Chinese poetry, he nevertheless kept a cautious distance from any literary trends or labeling. After witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China and did not return for more than a decade. Upon his return to China in 2004, the literary community received him with honor and praise. Duo Duo currently resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University in China.

Belletrista, Issue two is now up on the web.

http://www.belletrista.com/2009/issue2/index.php

Besides 20 reviews (including those by Club Read members: rachbxl, nickelini, charbutton, akeela, kidzdoc, polutropos, depressaholic, timjones and other LTers), there are 6 feature articles and, of course, our New & Notable section.