opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 December 2025

11 December: Nobel day | Adventures of Max Spitzkopf review
12 December: Booker Prize judges | Abdulrazak Gurnah profile
13 December: Irish Book Award | Jonathan Coe Q & A | Moonji at 50 | The Man Who Died Seven Times review
14 December: Meja Mwangi (1948-2025) | Joanna Trollope (1943-2025) | John Carey (1934-2025) | Icelandic prize shortlists
15 December: 'Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks' | Nordic literature exports
16 December: NBCC awards longlists | IPAF longlist | Wole Soyinka profile | Gone Tomorrow review
17 December: Banned ... in the US | Across the Acheron review
18 December: Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie longlist | Nonfiction falling out of favor ? | Norman Podhoretz (1930-2025)
19 December: Longlists: PEN America Literary Awards - NBCC Translation Prize
20 December: New World Literature Today | Literature in ... Yemen | Vengeance is Mine review

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       New World Literature Today

       The January-February issue of World Literature Today is now available, with a focus on: 'NSK Neustadt Prize Laureate Cherie Dimaline'.
       As always: check out the extensive book review section.

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

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       Literature in ... Yemen

       At Qantara.de Rehab Eldin Elhawary looks at literature in Yemen, focusing on the Almaqah literary club, in The last bastion of beauty.

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       Vengeance is Mine review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Friedrich Torberg's 1943 novella, Vengeance is Mine, finally coming out in English (in March), from Boiler House Press in their Recovered Books-series.

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       Longlists: PEN America Literary Awards

       They've announced the longlists for the many 2026 PEN America Literary Awards.

       Several of the titles are under review at the complete review:

       For the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation:

• Good & Safe by Liesl Ujvary, tr, Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie

       For the PEN Translation Prize:

• Exophony by Tawada Yoko, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
• On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
• The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, tr. David McKay
• Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade, tr. Rose Waldman
• Your Steps on the Stairs by Antonio Muñoz Molina, tr. Curtis Bauer

       For the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

• Ellmann's Joyce by Zachary Leader

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       Longlist: NBCC Translation Prize

       The National Book Critics Circle Board has now announced all the longlists for its prizes, concluding with that for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize.

       Three of the twelve titles are under review at the complete review:

• Exophony by Tawada Yoko, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
• Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, tr.Wendy H. Gabrielsen
• Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, tr. Natasha Lehrer

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       Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie longlist

       L'Organisation internationale de la Francophonie has announced the ten-title strong longlist for the 2026 prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, selected from 165 novels.
       The winner will be announced 19 March.

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       Nonfiction falling out of favor ?

       In The Guardian Emma Loffhagen wonders: Are we falling out of love with nonfiction ?

       As a not-great-fan of most popular non-fiction I'm just wondering: what took so long ?
       (It's been interesting to see the reactions to the recent Oliver Sacks revelations. I've always been near-allergic to and deeply suspicious of 'anecdotal' non-fiction (which so much of the popular stuff is) and so I never took to Sacks' writing. I know people are suckers for this sort of 'personal' stuff, and I can see the appeal -- but prefer to make a wide berth around it.
       Fiction, folks, fiction, that's the ticket; that's always been the ticket -- or, if you must: real non-fiction: hard numbers, abstract thought, reproducible evidence (rather than single-case studies), real scholarship.)

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       Norman Podhoretz (1930-2025)

       Longtime Commentary-editor Norman Podhoretz has passed away; see, for example, the obituary by ... John Podhoretz at Commentary, and those in The New York Times and The Nation -- where David Klion sums him up as: "the last canonical New York intellectual, and the first of a now-familiar breed of discourse demagogue".

       New York Review Books re-issued his Making It a while back; see their publicity page.

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       Banned ... in the US

       PEN America tallies up the Top 52 Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools 2021 to 2025 -- always depressing reading .....
       John Green's Looking for Alaska leads the way, with 147 bans.

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       Across the Acheron review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Monique Wittig's 1985 novel, Across the Acheron -- originally published in English by Peter Owen, and recently re-issued, in a slightly revised translation, by Winter Editions.

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       NBCC awards longlists

       The National Book Critics Circle has begun announcing the longlists for its annual awards -- yes, they're stringing this out all week ... -- with the first two now out: the longlists in the fiction and criticism categories
       Two of the fiction titles are works in translation -- and one of them is under review at the complete review: Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (Book III); one of the criticism titles is a translation, and that too is under review: Tawada Yoko's Exophony

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       IPAF longlist

       The International Prize for Arabic Fiction has announced the longlist for the 2026 prize -- sixteen titles selected from 137 submissions.

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       Wole Soyinka profile

       At Open Country Mag Otosirieze has a very long article on How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods -- and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy.

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       Gone Tomorrow review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Lee Child's 2009 Gone Tomorrow, the thirteenth Jack Reacher novel.

       This is apparently the novel that the upcoming season four of the Amazon Prime TV series is based on -- though the action has apparently been transplanted from Manhattan to ... Philadelphia ?!?? (I note that one of the reviews of the book suggests that Child here: "does for New York what Joyce does for Dublin, turning it into a dreamy city of the mind, the capital of a country that does not exist"; seems kind of a shame to waste that.)

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       'Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks'

       In Publishers Weekly Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart report how 'The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks', in Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks.
       A tragedy, at least for some of us (like me ...).

       Some amazing statistics in the article, including that in the US:

(M)ass market paperback unit sales easily dwarfed those of the other two formats, at 387 million in 1979, compared to 82 million for hardcover and about 59 million for trade paperback.

       And even in the late 1980s:

A 1988 article in PW pointed to the vibrancy of the format at that time. The year before, 112 mass market titles sold more than one million copies

       How may titles nowadays in any format sell a million copies ? And, indeed, PW reported that in 2011 only: "six mass market titles sold more than one million copies".
       And:

According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units.

       As longtime readers know, mass-market paperback is my preferred book format, and I have long lamented the transition to the horrific 'trade paperback' format. Taking up less bookshelf-space, and easier to hold, the mass-market paperback is obviously the superior -- the near supreme -- format (obviously, the true pocket-book -- Loeb Classical Library, old Everyman's etc., or Japanese 文庫本 -- are the true ideal book-size), and much -- most -- of my formative reading was in that format.
       They used to publish pretty much all fiction in this format -- from the good old Penguin Classics (and green mystery) volumes (now also sadly outsized) to ... even something like Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling:



       (Oh, yes: and the price was also right.)
       I have the ridiculously heavy hardcover edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, but this is the one I want; I'm pleased at least that my copies of some vital works are mass-market paperback editions: the Bantam editions of Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren, the Penguin (near-mass-market-sized) Finnegans Wake -- not to mention piles of other classics and contemporaries ......
       Fortunately, at least, the fact that they printed so many of these books means that there are still a lot floating around, and I can still fill out my collection with more. (My first stop at any library etc. sale is the mass-market paperback section .....)

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       Nordic literature exports

       The various Nordic literary export organizations commissioned a recently issued study on The Value of Nordic Literature Exports (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) which is of ... some interest.
       I'm no fan of 'surveys' and polls, and they acknowledge:

The survey was sent to a total of 76 agencies and publishing houses representing Nordic authors, and 43 responses were received, resulting in a response rate of 57%.

       So these are very incomplete numbers -- and without knowing who responded and who didn't have to be taken with considerable salt.
       The numbers seem interesting -- and somewhat surprising. Sweden really made nearly five times the royalties -- and sold double the translation contracts -- of the second most successful country (Norway) ? Over 45 per cent of Finnish revenue came from Children and YA sales (compared to 6.4 for Norway and 15.1 for Sweden) ?
       The data seems very incomplete to me -- but no doubt will be widely quoted and referred to. Is it really so hard to get the hard numbers, the real numbers, all the numbers ?

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

       Meja Mwangi (1948-2025)

       Kenyan author Meja Mwangi has passed away; see, for example, the report in The Sunday Standard.

       None of his books are under review at the complete review, but I did read several of them before I started the site; several of his works were published in the African Writers Series.

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

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       Joanna Trollope (1943-2025)

       English author Joanna Trollope has passed away; see, for example, the obituaries at the BBC and The Guardian.

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

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       John Carey (1934-2025)

       Literary critic John Carey has passed away; see, for example, the obituary in The Times.

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       Icelandic prize shortlists

       The Icelandic Publishers Association has announced the shortlists for both the Icelandic Literature Prizes and the Icelandic Crime Fiction Prize Blóðdropan.
       The winners will be announced in February.

       Meanwhile, at Iceland Review Michael Chapman reports that Icelandic Literature Thrives While Film Attendance Hits Record Low, as sales of Icelandic fiction are up domestically, while: "attendance at Icelandic films has reached its lowest point this year since records began in 1995". (I can't find the numbers, but how many Icelandic films can have been released in 2025 ? (this site suggests ... four) -- it's a country of less than 400,000 people .....)

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

       Irish Book Award

       They've announced the winner of this year's An Post Irish Book of the Year, and it is The Ghosts of Rome, by Joseph O'Connor; see also the publicity pages from Vintage and Europa Editions.

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       Jonathan Coe Q & A

       This week's 'The books of my life'-column at The Guardian features Jonathan Coe, in: Jonathan Coe: 'I was a Tory until I read Tony Benn'. .
       Among his responses:

The author I came back to

As a student I discovered Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson in the four-volume Virago edition and decided she was the British feminist Proust and it was my duty to read her. Boy, it was heavy going. Years later, I realised she doesn’t have to be read in full or in sequence: it can make more sense to take random dips and scoops which mirror the narrator’s own floating, unanchored consciousness.

       Pilgrimage has recently been re-issued in the US; see the Asterism publicity page.

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

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       Moonji at 50

       South Korean publisher Moonji held a 50th-anniversary commemorative event yesterday, and at The Chosun Daily Hwang Ji-yoon reports on how Munhakgwajiseongsa Celebrates 50 Years of Literary Legacy.

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

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       The Man Who Died Seven Times review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Nishizawa Yasuhiko's 1995 novel, The Man Who Died Seven Times, now out in English, from Pushkin Press.

       (Nishizawa died, just over a month ago, by the way; see e.g..)

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

       Booker Prize judges

       They've announced who will be judging the 2026 Booker Prize: Mary Beard will chair, and the rest of the panel consists of Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu, and Patricia Lockwood.
       They've also announced that the longlist will be announced 28 July 2026

       The press release also includes a look at 'The prize's impact', reporting on this year's winner, as:

Flesh by David Szalay, sold over 7,900 hardback copies in the UK in the week following its win on 10 November, a 1,441% week-on-week sales increase, with combined Ebook and audiobook sales in the same week totalling 15,000 copies, representing a 2,508% increase. (...) It has now sold over 37,000 print copies in the UK, with combined digital sales totalling over 40,000. Rights deals increased from 12 before Flesh’s longlisting to a total of 35 territories now either sold or under offer.

       Not bad.

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       Abdulrazak Gurnah profile

       At The Phoenix Zephyr Weinreich reports on Abdulrazak Gurnah's recent visit to Swarthmore, in Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Speaks on Campus.
       Among his comments:

One of the unexpected boons of going to England was that there were libraries and bookshops everywhere. It was then that I began to read just about everything I could find. And this reading absolutely energized my writing.

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

       Nobel day

       They had the big ceremony where they awarded the Nobel Prizes yesterday, and then the fancy banquet -- see the menu; the main course was ... turbot stuffed with scallops and sugar kelp.
       Anders Olsson gave the award ceremony speech for literature laureate Krasznahorkai László -- and Krasznahorkai gave his banquet speech (not to be confused with his lecture), thanking lots of folks and everything from the Italian Renaissance to "the last wolf in Extremadura".

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

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       Adventures of Max Spitzkopf review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jonas Kreppel's early twentieth-century collection of the Adventures of Max Spitzkopf -- The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes !
       This recently came out from White Goat Press, the Yiddish Book Center's imprint.

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

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