paperhaus March 12th, 2009
Yesterday I wrote about The Morning News’ Tournament of Books on Jacket Copy. It started interestingly, with both an obvious win and an upset. On the no-duh winning side, big fat 2666 by Roberto Bolaño; the come-from behind winner on day two was A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Berniers, which took down the PEN/Faulkner-Award winning Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.
I bet my friend Mark Sarvas was upset about that loss, because he’s been praising Netherland on his site The Elegant Variation for ages. But then comes today, when Mark’s debut novel Harry Revised went mano-a-mano with Booker Award-winning The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. And Harry won.
Congratulations, Mark!
Judge Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) didn’t care that Adiga had won a Really Big Award; he just liked reading Mark’s book more. It’s this kind of surprise, subjective measure that makes the Tournament of Books fun.
And it looks like the zombie round is going to be fierce….
paperhaus November 15th, 2007
Bloggers barnstorm the National Book Awards: Jason Boog with video, Ed with podcasts & blogging, even Sarah on Twitter. Joan Didion on Norman Mailer: “There was someone who really truly knew what writing was for.” And hooray Denis Johnson! Hooray Sherman Alexie!
In the UK, people like to read books — twice! Which is hard for those of us whose to-be-read pile(s) look something like this.
Laila sees No Country for Old Men, which isn’t playing yet it Pittsburgh (argh).
Cocktail of the day: Anis del Oso
paperhaus April 28th, 2007
Yes I made it form PA to the awards ceremony last night. (winners here) Jim Lehrer was the host; he asked us to think of him as a novelist first, TV guy second. “I have been a writer since I was 17 years old,” he said. “That’s a long time — a lot longer than I’ve been a pretty face on television.” He was great.
All the presenters were wonderful, and all seemed to have read and enjoyed the books they were presenting — with one exception. Steve Lopez, who is the most overrated local columnist in the city, sounded like he was reading off their back covers, repeatedly quoting New York Times book reviews. Uh, at least have the deceny to quote from the reviews of your own paper.
paperhaus April 17th, 2007
Hooray for Jonathan Gold! The incredible food critic who started out covering taco stands and smoke-choked Korean BBQ joints and pupuserias and tiny Thai kitchens and many more in Los Angeles has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Here’s a taste from his classic guidebook Counter Intelligence:
Meet lonja. Lonja is a slab of pigskin the size and heft of a Snickers bar, fried with a good half-inch of meat still adhering to it, and padded with enough insulating fat to power a team of sled dogs halfway across Saskatchewan. Lonja is fairly alarming as foodstuffs go — salty, chewy, breathtakingly high in cholesterol, and possessed of an extreme, tooth-cracking crunchiness that is probably responsible for half the bridegwork of Sonoroa. What we’re talking about is essentailly a chunk of deep-fried lard sandwiched between leathery flesh and steel-hard skin, a chaw primitive enough to make a Slim Jim seem like a shining example of modern meat-processing technology. Lonja, the most radical form of Mexian chicharrones, may be the monster-truck pull of the salty snack planet.
I have personally seen a man go through two pounds of lonja so quickly that it looked like bits of pig were leaping into his mouth by themselves…
That’s about Antojitos Denise’s, in East LA. I was looking for a piece he wrote about a certain shrimp dish, but I couldn’t page past the As in his book without getting hungry.
Props to Pulitzer’s literature winner, too: Cormac McCarthy. Who I can almost imagine being the one devouring that lonja.
paperhaus November 27th, 2006
Thought you knew the 5 finalists for the National Book Award’s fiction pick this year? Think again. Judge Marianne Wiggins reveals the first 5 finalists in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Anthony Giardina and Peter Behrens, who got bumped, must be peeved — and late adds Dana Spiotta and Ken Kalfus can’t be flattered.
paperhaus November 15th, 2006
The Reuters report on the National Book Awards is online. It’s nice to have a sentence or two from winner Richard Powers (a few more sentences, uttered just yesterday; and weeks ago he made an appearance at the end of this roundtable).
In the fiction category, Richard Powers won for his novel ”The Echo Maker,” which explores the nature of human intelligence set in rural Nebraska.
Powers, a previous finalist and author of eight earlier novels, thanked supporters of his books “that haven’t always been easy to market or classify.”
The other fiction finalists included Ken Kalfus’ “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” — a black comedy that traces the unraveling of a marriage in the aftermath of 9/11 — and Jess Walter’s “The Zero,” which follows the life of a policeman after a terrorist attack.
The two omitted nominees were “Only Revolutions” by Mark Z. Danielewski and Dianna Spiotta’s “Eat the Document.” Why leave them out? Maybe too much wine at the dinner. I imagine they serve wine.
paperhaus November 15th, 2006
Not me, I’m working on paper #2 of the three due this week. But Ed’s liveblogging it, with some help from someone on the inside. Apparently Octavian Nothing just took the YA — I mean Young People’s Literature — prize.
OK, back to work.
paperhaus October 17th, 2006
Kiran Desai tried workshopping at Columbia, decided it wasn’t for her (via).
Just as she has faltered in accepting American citizenship, she has been unwilling to embrace the American style of writing. Having attended a creative writing course at Columbia University, of which she says her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard was a product, she decided to start afresh. “It was very hard for me to write like that,” she explains. “They demand you write a certain way because you have to present your work in half-hour instalments. You are having to polish only a little bit of it. It suits the short story more than the novel.
“You certainly can’t sit there with the big, huge monster [novel] and function in any kind of way as an American writer, because you are constantly having to make grant applications, and you either have to exit that world or your work must change.”
Desai chose to exit. “I didn’t apply for grants or writers’ centres, I didn’t join writers’ groups. I just couldn’t do it. It didn’t seem an honest way to write to me. When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.”
Instead she lived on her advance, stretching it further by moving to Mexico for a while, occupying small rooms in overcrowded houses in New York.
Everyone was telling her to get a job, get some health insurance, and she managed instead to just write. Getting the Booker must feel mighty sweet.
paperhaus October 12th, 2006
The Nobel for literature goes to Orhan Pamuk (via The Millions).
The National Book Award finalists have been announced. Is this the first year that a nominee has a myspace page?
So you hate the Quill Awards. The Quills don’t hate you. Look at the love given — in the form of the best debut author award — to blogger Julie Powell, for her book Julie and Julia.
paperhaus August 22nd, 2006
The Quill Book Awards were announced this morning and Ed was not impressed.
I?m wondering just what point this particular awards ceremony serves.
The winners are ?feted at a gala event on October 10.? But with voting open to anyone, this is nothing less than the People?s Choice Awards of literature
Call me a manic democratizer, but why not have book awards where the voting is open to anyone? There are already plenty of awards selected by well-qualified committees — why not let the unwashed masses have a turn? The argument could be made that the people have voted with their wallets, but as far as I’m concerned, the more hoopla, fun and even, yes, fluff there is around reading, the better.
What if E! or Bravo covered the Quill Awards’ red carpet? Wouldn’t it be cool waiting to see if Kathy Griffin would make an obnoxious comment about JK Rowling’s hair color, if Isaac Mizrahi suprisingly grabbed the boobies of not Scarlett Johanssen but say, Doris Kearns Goodwin? If E.L. Doctorow, clad in a tux, came face to face with Joan Rivers? I guarantee you it would be more exciting than Book TV.
This week I watched the Teen Choice Awards — with a handful of creative writing grad students, no less — and while it was a corporate-controlled crapfest, it was still a fun crapfest. That is, until K-Fed started to sing, but that’s another story.
Anyway, I’m taking the opportunity to vote for Julie Powell for Debut Author, who is (I think) the only blog-turned-book nominee, for her yearlong cooking quest Julie and Julia. Voting for the Quill Awards is open now.
