opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

       Icelandic Book Prize preview

       They announced the finalist for the 2020 Icelandic Book Prize last month, and now at The Reykjavík Grapevine Valur Grettisson has a preview of the prizes, which will be announced in a couple of weeks, Reading Too Much Into The Icelandic Book Prize Nominees 2021. (It does seem that these are the 2020 prizes, however.)
       The finalists, in three categories (fiction, non, and children's literature), were selected from 280 submissions.
       One of the fiction finalists, Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson's Snerting -- see the Forlagið publicity page -- actually came out in English translation a couple of years ago already, as One Station Away; see the Ecco publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
       Another finalist is by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir -- who won the 2016 Icelandic Book Prize for Hotel Silence. It's interesting to hear that while her The Greenhouse was nominated for the Nordic Council Book Prize in 2009, it wasn't nominated for this prize that year:

Her sales in Iceland were actually quite low compared to her acclaim abroad, which perhaps explains her absence from the list, but the snub was still a scandal.

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       Adivasi literature

       At The Caravan Akash Poyam suggests Ten voices from Adivasi literature -- a useful overview, even if not very accessible to English-speaking readers at this point.

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       Grand prix de la Francophonie

       The Académie Française has announced the winner of this year's €30,000 Grand Prix de la Francophonie, and it is Lebanese author Alexandre Najjar; see also the Livres Hebdo report.
       Several of his works have been translated into English; see the author page at Saqi Books.

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       Top online reads in China

       At Sixth Tone Cai Xuejiao and Chen Qi'an summarize an iiMedia report, in Here Are the Top Reads From China's $5 Billion Online Literature Market.
       Yes, online reading and publishing is a big industry in China; I always wonder whether this sort of thing will catch on anywhere else to anywhere near this extent.

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       'Breaking Down the Bestselling Books of 2020'

       An interesting look at the most successful books (and publishers) in the US market last year, as Liz Hartman goes about Breaking Down the Bestselling Books of 2020 at Publishers Weekly.
       Despite the dominance of the so-called 'Big Five' in American publishing, independents had a good showing, at least in this area.

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       Swiss Literature Awards

       They've announced the (national) Swiss Literature Awards for 2021 -- seven for individual works, as well as the big (author) prize, the CHF40,000 Grand Prix suisse de littérature, which goes to Frédéric Pajak; see also the swissinfo.ch report, Frédéric Pajak wins top Swiss literature prize.
       New York Review Books published his Uncertain Manifesto not too long ago -- see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk --; I have a copy and will try to get to it.

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       Al Saqi Books profile

       In The National Jamie Prentis profiles Al Saqi Books, in Something in the water: the compelling tales of London's oldest Arabic bookstore.

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       Literature in ... Bhutan

       At Scroll.in Siok Sian Pek-Dorji reports on More reading, and even more listening: How the pandemic has affected literature in Bhutan.

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       Vassilis Alexakis (1943-2021)

       Greek-French author -- yes, he wrote works both in French and Greek -- Vassilis Alexakis has passed away; see, for example, Tasos Kokkinidis' report in Greek Reporter, Greek Writer and Journalist Vassilis Alexakis Dies at 77; obviously, there's also a lot coverage in the French media.

       Alexakis is woefully under-translated into English, but a bit of his work is available -- his novel Foreign Words for example; see the Autumn Hill publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Thebes at War review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of another of Naguib Mahfouz's early historical novels, Thebes at War.

       That is the twenty-eighth work by Mahfouz under review at the complete review -- but I still have so many to get to !

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       Banipal Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and it is Kay Heikkinen's translation of Velvet by Huzama Habayeb.
       See also the Hoopoe publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
       The prize will be awarded 11 February, along with the other Society of Authors Translation Prizes.

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       Dædalus online

       What great, great news: "In January 2021, Dædalus became an Open Access journal". They're still working on digitizing the back catalog, but eventually all this great material will be freely accessible.
       Some of it already is -- like the new Winter 2021 issue, 'On the Novel', edited by Michael Wood. Lots of things that look worth a closer read, including: Simon D. Goldhill arguing for Finding the Time for Ancient Novels, Robyn Creswell on Poets in Prose: Genre & History in the Arabic Novel, and Two Theories by Franco Moretti.
       A good-looking issue (on a topic of obvious interest ...), but that whole archive will be something to return to again and again .....

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       The bookseller of Kabul

       At Scroll.in Selina Sheth profiles Shah M Book Co-bookseller Shah Muhammed Rais -- yes, the The Bookseller of Kabul -- in For this bookseller of Kabul, the pandemic was a blip in a country afflicted by long-term war.
       Certainly an interesting story.

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       Coming in 2021

       The Millions has now posted their Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2021 Book Preview -- 152 titles to look forward to.
       Meanwhile, at Vulture they present 46 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021.
       Certainly some titles of interest here -- but there's a lot more coming out .....

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       Bestselling in the US in 2020

       At Publishers Weekly John Maher has the numbers -- the top twenty-five bestselling titles in the US in 2020, along with the number of copies sold (as reported by NPD BookScan).
       Barack Obama's A Promised Land was the only title to shift over 2,000,000 copies, and six more titles shifted over a million each. None of the top twenty-five are under review at the complete review.

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       Barbara Epler Q & A

       At the World Literature Today blog Veronica Esposito has a Q & A with the longtime New Directions publisher, in “Lusting after a Tart of Peacock Tongues”: A Conversation with Publisher Barbara Epler -- a good look at the changing publishing scene, especially regarding work in translation, in the US over the past twenty-five years.

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       The Dark Domain review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Stefan Grabiński's collection about The Dark Domain, recently re-issued by Dedalus.

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       Ved Mehta (1934-2021)

       Indian-born author Ved Mehta has passed away; see, for example, Margalit Fox's obituary in The New York Times, Ved Mehta, Celebrated Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 86, as well as the notice in The New Yorker.

       I read the first few installments of his twelve-volume memoirs -- it was a pretty fascinating life -- many, many years ago but never saw it through; predictably, the one Mehta title under review at the complete review is his novel, Delinquent Chacha.

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       Nobel archive (not-yet-)opening

       One of the fun traditions at the start of every year is that the Swedish Academy opens the archives regarding the deliberations about the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature from fifty years earlier; this is where we learn who had been nominated for the prize (and by whom), and who the choice came down to (as well as some of the reasons the eventual winner came out top). This year we are due to learn about the 1970 prize, which went to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn -- but, as you will have noticed, we haven't heard anything yet .....
       Usually, the archive is opened in the first days of January. This year, however, -- presumably in no small part because of the COVID-problem (closing the Nobel Library, among much else) -- they've announced they're postponing the big reveal, until (at least) the first of February; that is, for now, the provisional date for the opening; tune back in then .....

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       The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Gina Apostol's The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata.

       Originally published -- in the Philippines, where it won the National Book Award -- in 2009, this is the first time it has been published outside the Philippines, in a revised edition, just out from Soho Press.
       Also: I really, really have to get around to reviewing José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere. (His El Filibusterismo has long been under review at the site, but I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy of the Penguin Classics edition (Harold Augenbraum's new -- well, 2006 -- translation) -- see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.)

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       Karl Ove Knausgaard Q & A

       At the Los Angeles Review of Books Bob Blaisdell has: Writing Isn't a Sacred Activity, It Is an Ordinary Activity: A Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard

       See also the publicity pages for In the Land of the Cyclops from Archipelago Books and Harvill Secker, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Review copies in 2020

       In 2020 I received 231 (physical) review copies -- a stunning decline (-47.14%) from the 437 received in 2019; it is the fewest review copies received since 2004 and obviously had a significant effect on what was reviewed at the site, with a much greater than usual focus on older titles (both personal and older review copies).
       Naturally, the unusual conditions this year played a major role in this: publishers found it difficult -- and in many cases impossible -- to ship physical copies for much of the year. Many titles were also delayed; I suspect that particularly with these (many) more than usual review-copy requests fell through the cracks. The postal service slow-down at the end of the year certainly also contributed, with the trickle of incoming review copies coming to an almost complete stop.
       I greatly appreciate -- and am impressed by -- the efforts publicists did make under these difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, the much smaller number of review titles to work with strongly shaped what was reviewed at the site in 2020.
       The percentage of review copies that get reviewed at the complete review is surprisingly constant: as of 31 December 2020 I had reviewed 57 of the print review copies I had received in 2020 -- 24.68% of the total; in 2019 the year-end percentage, despite being from a much-larger pool, was 23.34%. (Naturally, too, as time goes by, more of the books received in 2020 will be reviewed -- there hasn't been much time to get to those December titles, for example. So also, for example, at year's end 2019 I had reviewed 102 titles received in 2019, while in 2020 I reviewed another 33 titles received in 2019.)
       (I did receive and certainly had access to, more e-review copies in 2020, but I've found those nearly impossible to work with; the fact that they are often time-limited is just one factor making them very difficult to use for review purposes. Ten of this year's reviews were based on e-versions -- up considerably from the 6 in 2019, but fewer than in 2018 (12) or 2017 (13) -- but, honestly, one is too many, and while in some cases there simply are no alternatives I will continue to avoid reviewing off e-copies when- and wherever possible; it's simply too unpleasant.)

       Some publishers obviously had it harder than others in 2020 -- notably Dalkey Archive Press, where business certainly could not proceed as usual, readily explaining why I only got three review copies in 2020, compared to 13 in 2019 -- but the change versus 2019 varied greatly from publisher to publisher. Only one that provided three or more review-copies in 2020 actually provided more in 2020 than 2019 -- a remarkable achievement by Archipelago Books (10 books in 2020, one more than in 2019).
       The top three providers of review-copies in 2020 were the same as in 2019, albeit in different order; the top ten providers of review copies in 2020 were:

• 1. New York Review Books 21 (2019: 30)
• 2. Other Press 17 (25)
• 3. Harvard University Press 15 (40)
• 4. Archipelago Books 10 (9)
• 5. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 10 (12)
• 6. Columbia University Press 8 (14)
• -. World Editions 8 (14)
• 8. New Directions 6 (14)
• -. Glagoslav 6 (8)
• 10. Wakefield Press 5 (8)

       Meanwhile, there were quite a few publishers who have generally provided more print review-copies but did not (no doubt mostly for very good reasons) in 2020: Oxford University Press provided 16 in 2019 but only 1 in 2020; Penguin Classics two (both Simenons; 2019: 19, also mainly Simenons); Yale University Press 3 (2019: 14); Vintage 1 (2019: 9); Europa Editions 1 (2019: 8). I did not receive any Seagull titles. (And I've still never seen a HarperVia title (except one ill-fated attempt to peruse a library e-copy), or any from Charco.)
       This isn't meant to be critical -- circumstances alone are pretty much good enough an explanation for me -- but I do point it out because it gives you some sense of what titles I did not have access to, and how that shaped review-coverage at the site. Obviously, the titles of some of these publishers would be of great interest -- but without them at hand ... well, maybe I'll come across copies years from now and get to them then .....
       (Obviously, another problem in 2020 has been the limitations on personal acquisition. This has particularly affected library-browsing -- often a source of more popular current titles from bigger houses (as you may have noted, I get very, very few review copies from the major commercial houses). I did purchase quite a few books, via online sources, but these tend to be used books, and older titles at that -- again explaining some of the peculiar skew of what got reviewed in 2020.)

       I will add that, regardless of circumstances, I remain surprised by how hard it is for me to get review copies (yes, this isn't a new issue). I realize the site is a blip on the World Wide Web -- but as far as especially fiction in translation goes, it's maybe not entirely insignificant ..... (I note with some amusement that the Alexa rankings for the site at the beginning of this year put it in the top 100,000 worldwide -- and while I think that is (beyond) unlikely, as a comparative measure it seems a reasonably useful tool, and the complete review would seem to fare pretty well re. comparable sites, including some quite well-known print publications .....)

       See also the comprehensive Index of Books Received and Acquired - 2020.

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       Q & A: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo

       In the New Statesman they have a Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo Q&A: “My mother passed the dream of education on to me”.
       Among his responses:

What would be your Mastermind specialist subject ?

Power relationships between languages

       As they also note, Ngũgĩ's The Perfect Nine recently came out in the UK (and the US).

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       Q & A: Zsuzsa Koltay

       At hlo they have a Q & A with Zsuzsa Koltay: The Pursuit of Happiness – on Translating Nándor Gion.
       She translated Gion's Soldier with Flower; get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. For more about Gion, see the Publishing Hungary author page.

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       Dawn Powell's A Cage for Lovers

       At The New Yorker Richard Brody writes on how: An Out-of-Print Dawn Powell Novel Reveals Her Misunderstood Art.
       The novel is A Cage for Lovers, apparently never re-published after it first came out in 1957.
       Brody makes the case that:

Powell was a master of literary psychology, of inwardness, of thought. Her novels depict introspection at a level of insight and imagination comparable to that of Dostoyevsky or Henry James; like them, she can go on for pages of unbroken text in detailing those states of mind and their labyrinthine intricacies.

       Brody also reminds of Powell's depressing literary career -- meeting some critical but hardly any financial success.

       I have a pile of Powells I've been meaning to get to -- the two volumes of the Library of America edition -- and this certainly makes me more curious about them.

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       2020 US book sales

       NPD BookScan report that Last year was the bestselling year for U.S. print books in the last decade, with unit sales up: "8.2 percent, year over year, to reach 751 million units"; they also list the top ten bestsellers of the year, led by Barack Obama's A Promised Land, followed by Midnight Sun, by Stephenie Meyer.
       I am not sure what to make of the fact that Juvenile Fiction outsells Adult Fiction by such a large margin.

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       Michal Viewegh profile

       I missed this when it appeared a couple of weeks ago, but at Radio Prague International they continued their 'The Czech Books You Must Read'-series with Tom McEnchroe's profile of Michal Viewegh - Master of satire in modern Czech literature -- who, with: "more than 30 books and 1.5 million copies sold under his belt [...] is quite possibly the Czech Republic's most popular contemporary author"
       His Bliss Was it in Bohemia -- described as his: "breakthrough novel" -- is under review at the complete review, as is the not yet translated Případ nevěrné Kláry.

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       The Three-Inch Golden Lotus review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Feng Jicai's The Three-Inch Golden Lotus, published in 1994 as part of the University of Hawaii Press' excellent but, alas, apparently now long inactive Fiction from Modern China series.

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       Canada Reads longlist

       They've announced the longlist for this year's Canada Reads -- the 20th edition --, with information about all fifteen titles.
       The panelists who champion the individual books will be revealed 14 January, with the debates about the books to be held 8 to 11 March.

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       Knausgaard on editors and writers

       A collection of essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard, In the Land of the Cyclops, is now out -- see the publicity pages from Archipelago Books and Harvill Secker, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- and at The Paris Review Daily they have one of the essays, on the always interesting subject of What Writers and Editors Do.

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       'African Writing in Chinese Translation'

       At his weblog Bruce Humes offers the useful: African Writing in Chinese Translation: 2020 Round-up and a Peek at 2021.
       Always interesting to see what foreign works get published elsewhere.

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       Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary (not so much ...) Awards

       They've now announced the ... outcome of the leading Iranian literary awards, the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards, and, well, as the Tehran Times reports: No novels, short stories deserve Jalal Literary Awards, juries say.
       Apparently it wasn't a good year for fiction -- or literature in general: "The literary review category had also no winner" -- though at least one novel got an honorable mention: اوراد نیمروز by Mansur Alimoradi; see also the Nimaj publicity page.
       Meanwhile:

In their statement, the jury of the short story section said, "All the story collections submitted to the organizers were not acceptable technically in their structure and context, therefore, there is no technical and professional justification for selecting a book as a winner of the literary award or honorable mention."

       Still, always good to see a literary prize upholding standards .....

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       10 years of the Aleph Book Company

       The Aleph Book Company was founded ten years ago, and at Scroll.in they have one of the co-founders write on Ten years of Aleph: David Davidar on building a publishing company from scratch in India.

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       Kracauer review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jörg Später's Kracauer: A Biography, recently out in translation from Polity.

       That's Siegfried Kracauer, of course -- and it's a pretty interesting life. And Polity also recently published the correspondence between Adorno and Kracauer -- see their publicity page -- which makes for a nice complementary work; I have this too, and hope to get to it.

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       Whitbread Costa Book Award category winners

       The Whitbread Costa Book Award has announced its five category-winners; these now go head-to-head for the title of Costa Book of the Year, which will be announced on 26 January.

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       Persian translation prize finalists

       The Tehran Times reports that there are Eight Persian translators contending for Abolhassan Najafi Award, given for the best translation into Persian of a novel.
       Finalists include translations of novels by Josef Winkler, Primo Levi (If This Is a Man), J.M.Coetzee, and Jules Verne -- and, impressively, Andrei Bely's Petersburg.
       Always fascinating to see what gets translated into other languages -- and always surprising to see what is being published in Iran.

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       'The future of publishing' ?

       At Scroll.in Arunava Sinha moderated: "a roundtable with professionals representing every segment of the value chain -- publishing, editing, marketing, sales, distribution, and bookselling" from India's English language publishing industry, in Insider predictions: What does the future of publishing look like after the pandemic ?
       They cover a lot; well worth a read.

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       2020 in review at the complete review

       Here is the annual overview of the year that was at the site, mostly in numbers:

       In 2020, 198 books were reviewed at the complete review, down from 209 in 2019 and in fact the first time with fewer than 200 titles covered (the soft target each year) since 2014. I'm a bit surprised I didn't cover more books, given that conditions -- no real possibility of travel; essentially housebound for most of the year -- should have lent themselves to it. But no .....

       You can find the 50 most popular reviews, 2020 here.

       The most popular author pages were:

1. Amélie Nothomb
2. Patrick White
3. Murakami Haruki
4. Naguib Mahfouz
5. Tom Stoppard

       The most popular review-indices were for:

1. Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related books
2. Far East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) literature
3. Mysteries and Thrillers
4. Science fiction
5. French literature
6. Eastern European literature
7. Books from selected Imprints and Publishers
8. Books Written Before 1900
9. German literature
10. Latin and South American literature

       After only ranking fourth in 2019, the erotic index was again the most popular (as it had been in 2018); the only new index is the Science Fiction one, as readers were perhaps looking for more escapist fiction.

       Books originally written in 38 languages (down quite a bit from 45 in 2019) were reviewed, with English significantly distancing all the others -- more so than in a long time.
       The top five languages were the same as last year -- albeit with German dropping from 3rd to 5th place, with significantly fewer books. A nice surprise was to see long-neglected Latin make it into the top ten.
       The top ten languages were:

• 1. English 54 (27.27% of all books) (2019: 46)
• 2. French 29 (2019: 39)
• 3. Japanese 13 (18)
• 4. Spanish 13 (12)
• 5. German 11 (20.5)
• 6. Latin 7
• 7. Portuguese 6
• 8. Arabic 5
• -. Chinese 5
• -. Italian 5

       I don't find counting countries as useful, since they change (and occasionally disappear) over the decades and centuries, but books by authors from more or less 55 countries (or rather: 55 more or less countries) were reviewed (2019: 59), the top ten being:

• 1. UK 23 (2019: 22)
• 2. France 22 (30)
• 3. US 21 (13)
• 4. Japan 14
• 5. India 10
• -. Italy 10
• 7. Canada 6
• -. China 6
• 9. Argentina 5
• -. Austria 5

       As usual, the vast majority of reviewed titles were novels (and sometimes often I wish that's all I covered ...) -- 155. My dislike of the shorter fiction form continues, and only four short story collections were covered (and if I never saw another story-collection again, I'd be fine with that, too). Seven dramas and three epics were also covered, along with thirteen works of general non-fiction.

       The spread of titles as far as when they were originally written was greater than usual, though recent titles still made up a significant proportion, including with 16 titles published in 2020 getting reviewed, not many fewer than the 18 2019 titles reviewed in 2019.

       The ratio of male-to-female authors remains poor, but women writers did almost make up a quarter of all reviewed titles, quite a bit above the abysmal historic average -- with 48 titles they made up 24.24 %.

       Little really stood out this year -- not only was no title graded 'A+' in 2020, but there wasn't even one graded 'A' either (there were two in 2019). Lots of very good books -- 21 did rate 'A-' -- but just no real standouts. The lowest grade given out was a 'C+' -- right at the end of the year, given to H.R.F.Keating's Jack, the Lady Killer.

       Books reviewed ranged in length from 26 to 1155 pages (2019: 70/1582). Twelve titles were over 500 pages long (2019: 10), and eight were less than 100 pages long (2019: 9).
       As with the number of books covered, the total number of pages reviewed was down, to 50,683 (compared to 54,185 in 2019) -- yes, I just didn't read as much --, with the average reviewed book having 255.97 pages (median: 230.5).

       If the number of books read was slightly disappointing, I wrote more about them than ever before: a total of 301,062 review-words (2019: 282,561), with the average review a whopping 1521 words (2019: 1352). The longest review was 5490 words long, seven more were over 3000 words, and twenty-four more over 2000. The median review was 1383 words long, up from 1213 in 2019.

       Overall, site traffic as a whole continued to decline -- though the site's year-end Alexa rank (a relative rather than absolute measure) was the highest it's been in years (though I doubt the complete review was actually the 102,982nd most popular site on the web at that time ...).
       Regionally, the decline in traffic was the greatest in Africa, down a stunning 44.19%, but more or less held steady in Oceania, Northern Europe, and Eastern Asia. The country providing a significant number of users with the most growth was (again) China, up 15.42% (and pushing it into the top ten of all nations).
       There were visitors from 222 countries and territories in 2020 (2019: 221).

       The countries from which the most traffic came were:

1. United States (35.40%; 2019: 34.49%)
2. India (10.71%)
3. United Kingdom (9.04%)
4. Canada
5. Philippines
6. Australia
7. Germany
8. Netherlands
9. China
10. South Africa

       As always, visitors to the site still overwhelmingly reach it via search-queries -- and Google search queries at that (Bing, DuckDuckGo, and anything else remain barely a trickle compared to the Google flood) -- while outside site-referrals continue to depressingly barely rate a mention.

       I think I will post separately on the review-copy count last year, as that certainly shaped what was reviewed and represented a big shift from recent years.

       Overall, it seems to have been a reasonably successful year -- though of course I never feel like I've gotten to enough books. Maybe in 2021 .....

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       Goethe Project 2021

       If you need a reading project for the new year, The Goethe Project 2021 sounds like a pretty good one.
       They explain that:

The Goethe Project 2021 seeks to increase the exposure of Anglophone audiences to the full scope of the author's writing. We have broken down the vast majority of his translated works into a year-long schedule, and throughout the year we will produce videos and blog posts and host regular public discussions with relevant experts on German literature and culture.

       They're starting of with The Sorrows of Young Werther -- a good and short entry-point -- and I'll remind the ambitious of Ulrich Plenzdorf's classic East German variation on it, The New Sorrows of Young W., which is well worth seeking out too.
       I've read a great deal of Goethe -- most of the major works -- but there is a whole lot of it; two works I've been toying with tackling are: Dichtung und Wahrheit (which the project will, impressively, also be covering) and Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe.

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

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       2020 in French publishing and literary awards

       The New York Times continues its recent fascination with the (scandal-ridden) French publishing and literary award-scene, with Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut finding: "a broader picture of an insulated, out-of-touch literary elite long used to operating above ordinary rules -- of morality, business or common sense", in: A Year of Scandals and Self-Questioning for France's Top Publishers.
       It continues not to look good. They note that three major publishing houses -- Gallimard, Grasset, and Seuil -- "have long had a grip on literary prizes":

Since 2000, these houses have collected half of all awards at France's top four literary prizes, while publishing the books of nearly 70 percent of their judges. Of the 38 current judges across the top four prizes, nearly 20 percent are employees of one of the three publishing houses.

       Meanwhile, in the new issue of The New Criterion, James F. Penrose writes: 'On the many book prizes of Paris and their attendant traditions', in Prize time in Paris -- helpfully covering quite a few prizes beyond just the Goncourt and Renaudot.

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       Most Popular Reviews - 2020

       The most popular reviews every year at the complete review tend to be reviews that have been available at the site for quite a while, and so it was again in 2020, with a top ten of familiar titles, and not a single 2020 review cracking the top 50. (It was close, however: Daniel Kehlmann's Tyll came in at 51.; in 2019 two titles reviewed that year cracked the top-50.)
       The top ten most read reviews in 2020 were:

1. El Filibusterismo, José Rizal
2. The Dilemma of a Ghost, Ama Ata Aidoo
3. The Three Mistakes of my Life, Chetan Bhagat
4. Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Okot p'Bitek
5. Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
6. Revolution 2020, Chetan Bhagat
7. Goat Days, Benyamin
8. Killing Time in a Warm Place, Jose Dalisay
9. Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, Kalidasa
10. The 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade

       The de Sade made the biggest leap, from 30th position in 2019.
       There were still 14 titles in the top 50 that weren't in the 2019 top-50 -- only slightly down from the 16 on the 2019 list that hadn't cracked the top-50 in 2018.
       See also the entire top 50, and the monthly top 15, on the page for the Most Popular Reviews - 2020.

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

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       Apocalypse | An Alexandrian World Chronicle review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Pseudo-Methodius' Apocalypse, which, in this Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition, also includes An Alexandrian World Chronicle.

       This is a rare tri-lingual edition under review, with both the ancient Greek and Latin translations of Apocalypse and the Latin translation of An Alexandrian World Chronicle presented here. Curiously enough, neither work is, however, presented in the original version: Apocalypse was written in Syriac, An Alexandrian World Chronicle in classical Greek.

       Why review an Apocalypse at this time ? You really have to ask ?

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

       Translations from the Japanese - 2021

       At The Japanese Times Iain Maloney offers some Exciting books and translations from Japan to look out for in 2021.
       One of these is actually already under review at the complete review -- Saihate Tahi's Astral Season, Beastly Season.
       And two more titles that I'm looking forward to are: Mizumura Minae's An I-Novel -- see the Columbia University Press publicity page, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- and part one of Takamura Kaoru's Lady Joker -- see the Soho Press publicity page, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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

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       '2021 in books'

       The Guardian offers an extensive -- if UK-focused -- calendar of 2021 in books: what to look forward to this year

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

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       Point Zero review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Armenian author Narek Malian's Point Zero.

       This is out from Glagoslav, who continue to do a great job bringing us popular contemporary fiction from many otherwise overlooked countries of the former Soviet Union (and some less than overlooked ones, like, Russia, too ...). (They also have a great list of classic Eastern European literature.)

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

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