Posts Tagged ‘Man Booker Prize’
Of Bloggers and Book Clubs
September 26, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
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Larger Than Life: An Interview with Will Self
August 9, 2012 | by Jacques Testard
Last August, I interviewed Will Self—whose latest novel Umbrella has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize—in his London home. I had been given two weeks to prepare and I was quite terrified. My terror was warranted; I had spent the last ten days immersed in his hallucinatory fictional worlds, composed of seven novels, three novellas, and countless short stories. Through these parallel and often overlapping fictions, Self has constructed a relentless critique of our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores, and political inadequacies. My fears, notwithstanding being intellectually dwarfed, were largely to do with the sheer madness of many of his writings. Here was the writer who, over the years, had invented:
1. A man who wakes up with a vagina behind his left knee and has an affair with his (male) GP (Bull: A Farce);
2. A parallel Earth populated by nymphomaniacal and exhibitionist apes seen through the eyes of its most prominent experimental psychiatrists (Great Apes);
3. The afterlife taking place in the purgatorial London district of “Dulston,” a suburb populated uniquely by senseless, chain-smoking dead people, haunted by their aborted fetuses and old neuroses, and living out the rest of infinity in dire office jobs (How the Dead Live);
4. A postapocalyptic London governed by a religion based on a cab driver named Dave’s insane writings to his estranged son in the 2000s (The Book of Dave).
And then there was the public figure—an acerbic satirist of towering intellect, a giant man of letters with a rhetorical bite strong enough to tear a lesser being apart. By the time I rang on the doorbell, Will Self had, to my mind, transmogrified into The Fat Controller—the Mephistophelian antihero in his My Idea of Fun—ready to shred me from limb to limb for my idiotic questions and inadequate readings.
Helpmeets, Field Guides, Burning Questions
July 26, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
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Arundhati Roy on ‘Walking with the Comrades’
November 1, 2011 | by Anderson Tepper
Arundhati Roy. By Sanjay Kak.
Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, helped transform her into an overnight literary celebrity and something of a poster author for the boom in Indian writing. (Billboards across the country trumpeted her Booker victory.) She followed up the novel, however, with a stinging essay condemning India and Pakistan’s nuclear showdown, entitled “The End of Imagination,” and set off, as she’s said, “on a political journey which I never expected to embark on.” She was soon taking up the pen on a range of issues—big dam projects that were displacing communities, India’s occupation of Kashmir, political corruption, and Hindu extremism. Suddenly, she was seen in a very different light at home: a voice of conscience, perhaps, but also a shrill and uncomfortable reminder of what lurked behind India’s democracy.
But perhaps nothing quite prepared her for the virulent response to her March 2010 cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, an inside report from the jungle camps where Maoist insurgents (and tribal villagers) were locked in a deadly and drawn-out battle with government forces over mineral-rich land. “Here in the forests of Dantewada [in central India],” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” That article forms the centerpiece of her new collection, Walking with the Comrades, from Penguin Books; while Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out now from Verso, also includes pieces by Roy as well as Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and others. She’ll be making two rare appearances in New York next month, at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 9 and the Asia Society on November 11. I recently spoke with her by phone in Delhi. Read More »
From the Cloakroom, at the Booker
October 20, 2011 | by Jonathan Gharraie
Julian Barnes by Ross MacGibbon.
For the real action at this year’s Man Booker Prize, you had to hit the cloakroom. For much of the evening, along with correspondents from all the major newspapers, I was sequestered in a large room in the palatial spread of the Guildhall. It was only when I ventured downstairs that recognizable faces attached to tuxedos and evening gowns began to drift in from the dinner. I ran across one former winner, dreamily improvising at an invisible keyboard while explaining how relieved he was to belong to what he called the great continuity of the prize; a well-known literary editor roamed the corridors, warily peering from right to left in the manner of a displaced meerkat; and Anne Robinson, host of The Weakest Link, was huddled against a wall, unusually hushed by the seashell allure of her cellphone. Read More »
On the Shelf
October 19, 2011 | by Sadie Stein
A page from Spalding Gray's journal. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.
- After a particularly contentious run-up, Julian Barnes (finally) wins the Booker.
- The ceremony was ... eventful.
- On the other side of the pond, the National Book Award apologizes for its error.
- Lauren Myracle withdraws.
- Roz Chast: “I think that children’s books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn't think after reading Madeline that they were going to get appendicitis?”
- Amazon hoards its superheroes.
- Stan Lee creates new ones.
- Tintin, the movie.
- The Seagull, the movie.
- Spot the fake title.
- Bram Stoker’s notebooks!
- Spalding Gray’s journals!
- C. S. Forester’s lost novel!
- Emily Post 4.0: “Just because someone’s IM service shows them as being ‘available,’ doesn’t necessarily mean they are ... Respect ‘do not disturb’ status. Remember, each time you IM you are interrupting someone.”
