opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

       Helen DeWitt gets her 175K after all

       Last week I mentioned that they had announced the winners (and recipients of US$175,000 each) of this year's Windham-Campbell Prizes -- and that The English Understand Wool-author Helen DeWitt was originally slated to be one of the winners but that .... fell through.
       Now the Mercatus Center has announced that DeWitt will be the first recipient of a new Emergent Ventures Arts Patronage award -- paying out a not in the least coïncidental US$175,000; see also Tyler Cowen's mention at Marginal Revolution, where he notes that:

This is a new tranche of ad hoc awards, given out more like prizes, without applications, to writers, creatives, and intellectuals who are not supported by the current system of awards and grants, or who have been failed by such systems.

       Yes, a not-so-subtle dig at the Windham-Campbell folk.

       See also DeWitt's tweets acknowledging the grant.

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       Premio de la Crítica

       In Spain, they've announced the Premio de la Crítica, with Marcos Giralt Torrente taking the Spanish-language fiction prize for Los ilusionistas -- see also the Anagrama publicity page -- and Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov (well, Gueorgui Gospodínov in Spain) winning the award for the best foreign work; see also the El País report.
       The other fiction winners are: L'anell del Nibelung by Amadeu Fabregat (Catalan); see also the Proa publicity page; O lanzador de coitelos by Fernando Castro Paredes (Galician); see also the Editorial Galaxia publicity page; and Dena zulo bera zen by Eider Rodríguez (Basque); see also the Susa publicity page.

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       Fiction (not) in India

       At Times Now Girish Shukla wonders Why Almost Every Major Indian Writer Lives Abroad and What It Has Done to Indian Fiction ?
       I'd suggest that a big part of the problem is that it's just so much harder for 'homegrown' literature to get published and distributed outside of India; I suspect there are quite a few 'major' writers who we are just not seeing much of .....

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       Xingyun Awards finalists

       At Locus they publish the list of finalists in the various categories of the Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction.
       The translated category includes a work by Stanisław Lem and an Arthur C. Clarke-biogrpahy (though I note it's listed under 'Best Translated Fiction' ...).

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       Amitav Ghosh Q & A

       At The Observer Jeevan Vasagar has a Q & A with The Calcutta Chromosome-author -- though mainly about his Ghost-Eye and Wild Fictions -- in Amitav Ghosh: ‘It’s a fool’s errand to imagine the future’.

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       AI and book promotion

       In the Global Times Ji Yuqiao finds that AI can extend a book’s reach, but not at the expense of its essence -- exploring:

Could AI-powered video storytelling rejuvenate how publishers connect with younger audiences, or does the trend risk flattening the rich complexity of literature to mere visual spectacle ?

       Not my kind of thing, but as Ji points out:

The fact is, traditional book promotion methods, such as book reviews, author events, static posts on social media platforms, barely make a dent among younger digital-native readers.

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       Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay profile

       At Scroll.in Ankush Pal profiles Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay at 150: The rebel novelist whose words can still ignite fires.
       He suggests:

Devdas mirrors the ache of his emotional genius, and it is this novel that has arguably done more than any other single work to cement his immortality in the popular imagination.

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       Sherborne Prize

       They've announced the winner of the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing -- awarded for the first time this year -- and it is Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth.
       See also the publicity pages for Lone Wolf from Hutchinson Heinemann and Crown.

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       Seized books in Sri Lanka

       360 copies of novels by Theepachelvan Piratheepan have been 'detained' in Sri Lanka, withheld: "on the grounds that they may be “damaging to national harmony”".
       Methmalie Dissanayake has the story, in considerable detail, in The Sunday Morning, in Literature vetting: Detained novels expose regulatory grey area.

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       If This Be Magic review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Daniel Hahn on The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, in If This Be Magic.

       (Yes, the title is also a nod to that of Gregory Rabassa's translation memoir, If This Be Treason -- while the full quote from The Winter's Tale is: "If this be magic, let it be an art".)

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       Books in Translation in Europe

       Via (where they summarize the report) I am pointed to the recent report on 'Trends and Transformations in the European Publishing Market', in Books in Translation (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) -- 141 pages, which should keep you covered for the weekend.
       Lots of numbers and statistics of interest.

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       Book references in political science journals

       Via I am pointed to Alixandra B. Yanus and Phillip J. Ardoin's article from last fall, From Bookworm to Browser: The Decline of Books in Political Science Scholarship.
       Fascinating to see that:

By analyzing references in leading political science journals from 1990 to 2024, we reveal a notable shift: a decline in book references (52% to 28%) and a corresponding increase in journal article references (40% to 65%).

       Also of interest/concern:

Moreover, whereas it is suggested that eBooks could mitigate these concerns, user tests reveal that readers consume eBooks differently than physical materials. Specifically, eBook readers rely on keyword searches to find “specific information,” spending an average of only 10 minutes engaging with a digital book

       Not great, I think.

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       Kindle bricking

       As widely reported, Amazon is making older-model 'Kindles' ... less useful. See, for example, Michael Kozlowski's report at Good E-Reader, You can no longer buy e-books on Amazon Kindle made in 2012 or earlier, which prints the Amazon e-mail announcing that they are "discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier".
       As longtime readers know, I am no fan of e-reading generally, but I steer particularly clear of Kindle e-books, as 'buyers' don't actually purchase the text but rather only license it. Now Amazon gives us another reason to steer entirely clear .....
       The internet age has has given us its fair share of technological obsolescence, but this seems like a particularly unnecessary low.

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       Premio Aena

       I mentioned the new Premio Aena de Narrativa Hispanoamericana recently, because it is one of the best-paying book prizes out there, with a €1,000,000 prize for the winner, and they've now announced the first winner, and it is Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin; see, for example, the report in the Buenos Aires Herald.
       See also the publicity pages for Good and Evil and Other Stories from Alfred A. Knopf and Picador.

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       IPAF

       They've announced the winner of this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and it is صلاة القلق, by Mohamed Samir Nada.

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       Goncourt de printemps shortlists

       The Académie Goncourt has announced (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) the finalists for its spring prizes -- for best first novel, stories, and biography.
       The winners will be announced 5 May.

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       Windham-Campbell Prizes

       They've announced the recipients of this year's Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes, paying out US$175,000 to each.
       They are: Gwendoline Riley, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Lucy Sante, Kei Miller, Christina Anderson, S. Shakthidharan, Joyelle McSweeney, and Karen Solie.
       The only one of these authors with any books under review at the complete review is Gretel and the Great War-author Sachs -- though I do also have a pile of Rileys to get to.

       I suspect this year's prizes will be much discussed, as one of the two fiction winners (Riley and Sachs) was second choice: originally, they had intended to honor the certainly also very deserving The Last Samurai-author Helen DeWitt; you can read why that didn't work out at her paperpools weblog, in the post We lose again: Windham-Campbell Prize manqué.
       Just one quote should give you some idea:

I think I am looking death in the face. Can’t get my head around this – impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror.

       It turns out the literary-industrial complex is even more screwed up than I could possibly have imagined.

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       Stella Prize shortlist

       The Stella Prize -- "celebrating Australian women and non-binary writing" -- has announced its shortlist, six titles in a variety of genres -- poetry, fiction and non, and a graphic novel.
       The winner will be announced 13 May.

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       German Book Prize entries

       They've announced the number -- but, alas, not the actual names -- of titles submitted for this year's German Book Prize: 180 titles submitted by 106 publishers.
       The longlist will be announced 11 August, the shortlist 8 September, and the winner on 5 October.

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       Paramount Global Publishing

       So Paramount Launches Global Publishing Imprint to Expand Iconic Franchises and Deepen Original Storytelling, as:

Paramount, a Skydance Corporation, today announced the launch of its own publishing imprint, Paramount Global Publishing, marking a strategic expansion in how fans engage with the company's revered content while also creating new opportunities to develop original IP.

       Apparently they'll be: "publishing content inspired by its iconic portfolio of brands and franchises". I couldn't find a handy overview of what those might be at the corporate site, but, yeah, sure.

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       Dublin Literary Award shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Dublin Literary Award -- six titles, three of which are translations from the French.
       The only title under review at the complete review is Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet (published in the UK as Perspectives because ... publishers ...).
       The winner will be announced 21 May.

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       Translations of Bengali historical, literary, and philosophical works

       At Columbia Magazine Paul Hond's report Jennifer Crewe Retires from Columbia University Press has some sensational news tucked in:

All this came with the big news, delivered by vice provost and University Librarian Ann Thornton, that literary theorist and University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of several CUP authors in attendance, had just made the largest gift in the history of the press: $3 million for an endowed fund in honor of her parents. The fund, said Thornton, will enable CUP to publish English translations of historical, literary, and philosophical works in Bengali

       This sounds very promising indeed; I can't wait to see these.

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       PEN America on 'The State of Literary Translation in the U.S.'

       Via I'm pointed to the recent PEN America report, Fairness in Publishing: The State of Literary Translation in the U.S..
       Lot's here that is of interest (and, yes, lot's that's depressing ...).

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       'Piracy and African Literature'

       At okayafrica Esohe Iyare considers how: 'The practice of end-user literary piracy, driven by the unavailability and high cost of classic titles, pits the moral imperative of intellectual property against the urgent need for access and preservation in African literature', in Piracy and African Literature: The Blurred Lines Between Ethics and Access.
       Iyare takes the recent making-available of "scanned copies of many titles from the African Writer Series" as a starting point -- noting also that: "289 of the 359 titles in the series have been out of print since 2002"
       I'm a huge fan of the series -- see the AWS titles under review at the complete review --; it's one of those imprints where, if I come across a title from it I don't have I'll buy it. (I do draw the line at e-copies, but then that's because I find it almost impossible to read a book in an e-format.)
       Some interesting numbers and statistics here -- including:

In a survey of over 100 readers of African Literature, 93% of whom live in Nigeria, a staggering 73.5% indicated that they were strongly interested in reading older African literature, but only 11.7% of readers say that these titles are easy for them to find.

       (I know the feeling.)

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       Tanka poetry

       In The Japan Times Zoria Petkoska reports on Why tanka poetry is clicking with a new generation.
       As Petkoska notes:

Written in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure, tanka is one of Japan’s oldest poetic forms, with a history spanning more than 1,300 years. [...] And while haiku has gained global recognition, it is tanka that has recently captured the attention of Japan’s younger generations.

“Haiku is more descriptive of the environment … frogs jumping into ponds and such,” says Damiana De Gennaro, an academic at Stockholm University whose main area of research is tanka communities, referencing a classic haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644-94). “But what tanka does is communication between people.”

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       The Camp of the Saints

       Among the worst, and surely the most offensive books reviewed at the complete review is Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, and at Le Monde Olivier Faye now writes at some length on How 'The Camp of the Saints' became the far right's cult novel, from the Le Pens to MAGA.
       (I'm always reluctant to even just mention this atrocity but ... it's out there, and gets a lot of attention (and readers). As Faye notes:)

Translated into around 15 languages, The Camp of the Saints has sold several hundred thousand copies since its release, including around 50,000 abroad. Its most recent 2011 reissue in France alone accounted for nearly 80,000 sales. The book is still regularly reprinted. Many elevated Raspail, who died in 2020, to the rank of prophet, supposedly foreseeing before anyone else the significance of the migration phenomenon.

       Faye chronicles some of its US publication history, but the copyright page of my edition is already pretty revealing:



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       The Corrections - the TV mini-series ?

       We've been here before: in 2012 HBO wanted to make a mini-series of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections but bailed on it (see my previous mention); now, as widely reported, Netflix has announced Meryl Streep to Star in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections Adaptation; ominously: "There's no release date yet".
       Interestingly, as, for example, Nellie Andreeva reports at Deadline:

Netflix bought The Corrections from Paramount TV Studios, which is owned by Paramount, the company that recently outbid Netflix for Warner Bros.

For The Corrections, the roles were reversed, with Netflix outbidding Paramount+, among others. I hear PTVS pitched the project to its sibling streamer, which made an offer. HBO did not, having developed its own take on Franzen's book a decade and a half ago, sources said.

       Well, we'll see if this one takes.

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       Ben Lerner

       Ben Lerner's new novel Transcription is just out and getting exceptionally good reviews, and so there have also been quite a few profiles and Q & As; see, for example (all possibly paywalled):

• Ben Lerner: ‘Screens are destroying us but we don’t know what they’ll open up’ by Will Pavia in The Sunday Times
• Ben Lerner and the Impossible Interview by Andrew Marantz at The New Yorker
• Ben Lerner’s Big Feelings by Kevin Lozano at Vulture

       (I haven't seen Transcription yet; but see, for example, the publicity pages from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Granta.)

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       New Spiró György novel

       At hlo Róbert Bak reviews Spiró György's novel Padmaly; see also the Magvető publicity page.
       I was very impressed by Spiró's Captivity, and clearly we should see more of his books in English translation; see also the Magvető Rights author page, with information about some of his other (still untranslated) books.

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       Halcyon Years review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Alastair Reynolds's recent novel, Halcyon Years.

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       The Complete Review at 27

       The first reviews were posted at the complete review on 5 April 1999 -- yes, twenty-seven years ago today. And now here we are, this twentieth-century relic still plodding along, 5452 reviews later ......
       I've been a bit distracted for a while now, so the review-rate has slowed down some for some time, but I will get back up to speed eventually, once a couple of things have been sorted. Meanwhile, raw page-view numbers are up tremendously over the past year -- but the majority of these clearly come from AIs hoovering up information; the number of actual readers seems to be continuing its steady slow decline, though an active, dedicated core remains -- much appreciated !

       I do have a lot more books I want to get to, so I figure I'll keeping going for a while.

       I hope you continue to find the site useful and of interest, and I appreciate your looking in !


       But twenty-seven years ... man, that's a long time.

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       The popularity of Norwegian literature in Nazi Germany

       At Sciencenorway.no Bård Amundsen explores What made books from Norway so appealing in Nazi Germany ? -- pointing also to Kathryn E. Sturge's interesting dissertation, “The Alien Within”: Translation into German During the Nazi Regime (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) and the more recent book by Narve Fulsås, Norsk litteratur i Nazi-Tyskland (see also the full text (warning ! dreaded pdf format !)).
       Always good to see actual numbers, too:

Before the war ended, Trygve Gulbranssen had sold over half a million copies of these books in Germany. No other translated works reached such a high circulation in the Third Reich.

Other books that sold well included Mikkjel Fønhus' Troll-Elgen (430,000 copies) and Knut Hamsun's Victoria (392,000) and Growth of the Soil (245,000).

Another, lesser-known Norwegian author who sold a great many books in Germany was Olav Gullvåg. His novel It Began on a Midsummer Night sold over 250,000 copies.

       And interesting to hear that:

Fulsås points out that the German market was also very economically attractive.

There was a great demand for literature in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It became even greater after the war started in 1939.

World War I had shown exactly the same thing: when there's war, people want to read books.

This also happened in Norway during World War II.

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       Margaret Drabble profile

       At The Times Alice Jone profiles Margaret Drabble at 86: ‘I could write terrible things about people’ (possibly paywalled ?).
       Among the titbits of interest: the mention of her sitting room being: "lined with books (Samuel Beckett to Lee Child)"
       And interesting to learn that:

In 2004 she published The Red Queen, a historical novel set in 18th-century Korea. “Oh, that was a disaster,” she says. “Not my finest hour.” Accusations of cultural appropriation and a row with a translator left her feeling “unhappy” with the whole idea of writing fiction.

Still, she wrote three more novels, then, in 2017, her daughter, Rebecca, died of cancer, aged 53 — and she knew her life as a novelist was over. “I just realised that I simply didn’t want to do it any more. I was in the middle of something and I really had no wish to finish it.”

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       Premio Strega longlist

       They've announced the longlist for this year's Premio Strega, the leading Italian fiction prize -- twelve titles selected from 79 submissions (written by authors ranging in age from 20 to 94).
       There are eight hundred eligible voters who will now vote for first the shortlist -- to be announced 3 June -- and then the winner, to be announced 8 July..

       They've also announced the five finalists for the Premio Strega Europeo, awarded for a European work of fiction in translation.
       The winner will be announced 17 May.

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       Anne Fadiman Q & A

       At The Harvard Gazette Liz Mineo has a Q & A with the author, in Writing about a pet frog is trivial ? Anne Fadiman disagrees.
       Among her comments:

AI is going to change both education and literature. I think it’s going to be like B.C. and A.D. B.C. is about to end: the period during which all books were actually written by humans.

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       PEN America Literary Awards

       PEN America has announced the winners of its Literary Awards.
       The PEN Translation Prize went to Minna Zallman Proctor for her translation of The Leucothea Dialogues by Cesare Pavese.
       The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation went to Michael Martin Shea for his translation of Theory of the Voice and Dream by Liliana Ponce.

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       EBRD Literature Prize shortlist

       The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has announced the ten-title shortlist for its Literature Prize, awarded: "for a work of literary fiction originally written in a language of an economy where the Bank invests, translated into English and published in the past year".
       Several of the shortlisted titles are under review at the complete review:

• Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel
• Eye of the Monkey by Tóth Krisztina, translated by Ottilie Mulzet
• Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillip
• We Computers by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

       The winner will be announced 2 July.

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       Wiesław Myśliwski (1932-2026)

       Leading Polish author Wiesław Myśliwski has passed away; see, for example, the Polish Museum of America mention.

       Archipelago Books has published several of his excellent books.

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       International Booker Prize shortlist

       They've annouced the shortlist for this year's International Booker Prize.
       The six finalists are:

• The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
• The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar
• On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia
• She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
• Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
• The Witch by Marie NDiaye

       The winner will be announced 19 May.

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       Baifang Schell shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Baifang Schell Book Prize, which: "celebrates exceptional book-length works on or from China and the Sinophone world that are geared toward the general reader".

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       Kertész Imre and his German readership

       At hlo Katharina Raabe writes at length about the Nobel laureate, exploring How Imre Kertész Found His German Readership
       Among the titbits of interest:

In Hungary, Kertész had been making a name for himself primarily as a translator from German since 1980, with translations of plays by Tankred Dorst, Walter E. Richartz’s Büroroman (Office Novel), and above all the works of Hofmannsthal, Nietzsche, Elias Canetti, and Wittgenstein.

       And, with elections coming up in Hungary, it's worth remembering:

Since at least 2010, Orbán has represented everything Kertész opposed in the 1990s, and which ultimately drove him from the country after he received the Nobel Prize in 2002: hatred of the other, and particularly anti-Semitism.

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       Lionel Gelber Prize

       They've announced (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) the winner of this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a C$50,000 award for: "the best book on international affairs published in English", and it is Thinking Historically, by Francis J. Gavin; see also the Yale Univesity Press publicity page.

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       David Bellos Translation Prize

       Literary agency Janklow & Nesbit UK has announced a new literary prize, the David Bellos Translation Prize, to: "be awarded to the translator of an excerpt from a novel originally written and published in any language other than English".

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       VCU Cabell First Novelist Award longlist

       I missed this last week, but they've announced the longlist for this year's VCU Cabell First Novelist Award -- twenty titles strong.

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       Yagisawa Satoshi profile

       At nippon.com they profile the Days at the Morisaki Bookshop-author, in Yagisawa Satoshi: An Interview with the Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Author About His International Bestseller.
       Interesting to hear that:

“My novel, which had been described as ‘bland,’ became popular overseas during the pandemic, and then people began reading it in Japan. Maybe everyone was feeling worn out,” Yagisawa says.

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       AI and publishing

       There have been quite a few articles about this -- the cancellation Shy Girl after it was discovered that it was written with the ... *help* of AI -- already, but the mounting hysteria is hard to resist: ‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books.
       Publishers won't stand a chance ? Well, we can always hope. Fun to hear, in any case, that:

“Sophisticated authors who want to evade the detection tools know how to edit their text, test it against these tools and revise again,” [assistant professor at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute Nikhil Garg] said.

       Fun times ahead, at any rate -- but I certainly don't envy anyone who has to deal with manuscripts right now (literary agents, publishers, etc.).
       At least, for all their many faults, I feel fairly confident that no one will ever mistake my reviews for AI-generated. (Same goes for my Salome in Graz, too.)

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       The Village on the Edge of the World review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Nobel laureate Herta Müller in conversation with Angelika Klammer on Writing and Surviving Ceaușescu's Romania, in The Village on the Edge of the World, coming out in English in May.

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       Bookshops in the Middle East

       At Cairo Scene Yasmin Farhat profiles Six Historic Bookshops Keeping the Arab World's Literary Soul Alive.

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       Kim Stanley Robinson on Mars-colonization

       At the New Scientist Red Mars (etc.) author Kim Stanley Robinson writes about: 'how the idea of moving to Mars holds up today' in (spoiler alert) Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
       He finds that, thirty-five years later: "the whole project of humans inhabiting Mars looks much more difficult than it did back then".

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       Abdulrazak Gurnah Q & A

       At The Observer Catherine Taylor has a Q & A with the Nobel laureate, in Abdulrazak Gurnah: ‘Tanzania is deeply embedded in my imagination’.

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       Benjamín Labatut on Bolaño

       At Publishers Weekly Nick Hilden speaks with the When We Cease to Understand the World-author about Roberto Bolaño -- " the writer that I cherish above everybody else" --, in Writers Talking Writers: Benjamín Labatut on Roberto Bolaño.

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       NBCC Awards

       The National Book Critics Circle has announced the winners of its 2025 Awards, with We Do Not Part by Han Kang winning the Fiction award.
       Interestingly, We Do Not Part was also a finalist for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Award -- but lost out to Natasha Lehrer's translation of Neige Sinno's Sad Tiger.

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       Alexander Kluge (1932-2026)

       German author Alexander Kluge has passed away; see, for example, the obituary at The Guardian and the Suhrkamp notice.
       Seagull has brought out a lot of his books in English; see also the Suhrkamp foreign rights information page.

       (Updated - 28 March): See now also Seagull publisher Naveen Kishore's Let the night be full of stories: A publisher’s tribute to German writer Alexander Kluge (1932–2026).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize

       They've announced the winners of this year's Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize -- the prize being shared by Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne (Moist Books) and Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden (Tangerine Press)

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       OCM Bocas Prize category winners

       They've announced the three category winners for this year's OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, with Ibis, by Justin Haynes, winning in the fiction category.
       The grand winner will be chosen from these three category winners, on 2 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Women's Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Women's Prize for Non-Fiction -- six titles.
       The winner will be announced 11 June.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       I Am a Cat profile

       At nippon.com Damian Flanagan profiles The Unnamed Cat Who Triggered Japan's Literary Explosion -- writing on Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat.
       Flanagan writes of the novel's opening line:

This wasn’t just an opening line. It was also perhaps the greatest haiku of modern Japan, and the point at which the modern era of Japanese literature truly begins

       As to the Itō Aiko and Graeme Wilson-translation -- the one under review at the complete review -- he feels they: "turned a tricky text into what reads like a quirky novel of Edwardian England".

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       Teddy Bears Never Die review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Cho Yeeun's Teddy Bears Never Die, coming out in English in May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       de Boon

       They've announced the winners of this year's de Boon, one of the leading Dutch/Flemish book prizes, paying out €50,000 to each of the winners.
       Grondwerk, by Tijl Nuyts, won the fiction/non-fiction category; apparently it is narrated by ... "a female naked mole rat". See also the Flanders Literature information page and the Atlas publicity page.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       図書新聞 (1949-2026)

       The loss of print book reviewing outlets is not just an American phenomenon: longtime Japanese book review periodical 図書新聞 (Tosho Shimbun) announced a few months ago that, after 77 years, they were closing shop as of 31 March.
       See now also Cécile Mazin's report at ActuaLitté, L'arrêt de Tosho Shimbun au Japon porte un coup dur à la critique littéraire.

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       Reading in ... Armenia

       At Armenian Weekly Anna Harutyunyan reports at some length on Books as an expensive pleasure: What does reading cost in Armenia ?
       Gotta love an article that uses as an example: "the complete poetry collection of Charles Aznavour" (this one).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Kawakami Mieko Q & A

       At the Literary Hub Leanne Ogasawara has a Q & A with the Sisters in Yellow-author, in Mieko Kawakami on Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Hope in the Darkness; it also includes quite a bit with the translators of the novel, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.

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       Joyce Carol Oates Prize finalists

       I missed this last week, but the New Literary Project has announced the five finalists for this year's Joyce Carol Oates Prize, awarded to a a mid-career author of fiction.
       No works by any of the finalists are under review at the complete review.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Drahomán Prize finalists

       PEN Ukraine has announced the three finalists for the Drahomán Prize, awarded for the best translation from Ukrainian, selected from thirty-one translations into eighteen languages.
       The one finalist that's a translation into English -- Nina Murray's of Lesia Ukrainka's Cassanadra -- is under review at the complete review.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Prix Ahmadou Kourouma

       The Salon du livre de Genève has announced (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) the winner of this year's prix Ahmadou Kourouma, awarded to an African author for a work of fiction in the tradition of the great African author, and it is La prière du cochon, by Libar M. Fofana; see also the Gallimard publicity page.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       README review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines by W. Patrick McCray, README, recently out from The MIT Press.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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