Hari Kunzru explains why he turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Some of the judges were angry that the prize was used as a “political platform” but I think it’s foolish to expect writers to keep to polite subjects rather than what makes them tick.
Jimmy Carter’s novel, the Hornet’s Nest, includes a sex scene. And that fact alone warrants this article.
The Seattle Times has a brief review of this year’s O. Henry and Best American Short Stories. The reviewer seemed to like O. Henry (I thought the selections were uneven.) She also complained that BASS has a story by Mary Yukari Waters and says that “both this story and last year’s selection were set in Japan, with similar themes.” That’s like complaining that a Flannery O’Connor story is set in the South.
Michiko doesn’t like the new collection of John Updike’s early stories very much.
Arguing that “a selection, surely, is best left to others, when the author is no longer alive to obstruct the process,” Mr. Updike has included virtually every short piece of fiction he wrote between 1953 and 1975 within these pages (presumably the later ones will be gathered in a gargantuan volume yet to come), and the resulting 800-plus-page book is a decidedly spotty production, filled indiscriminately with classic gems that attest to the author’s determination “to give the mundane its beautiful due”; clumsy apprentice works with creaky, contrived endings; and later ham-handed experimental efforts to expand Mr. Updike’s fictional terrain.
These lists pop up every once in a while, and are fun for about two minutes. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a list of twelve “standout books” for the fall.
Time’s Andrew Arnold has a rundown of the best graphic novels of the last quarter century, with the usual suspects making the cut. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis was included too. Haven’t read it yet? What are you waiting for? Also, Time readers respond with their thoughts on the list.
Sara Parestky writes about the genesis of her new novel, Blacklist.
[B]y a year ago, when I was working on my novel Blacklist, I was definitely scared. That was when news stories emerged about police seizing a man in a New Jersey library for reading foreign language pages on the Web. They held him for three days without charging him, without letting him call his wife or a lawyer, before deciding that he wasn
Hari Kunzru has turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize because it was co-sponsored by the Mail on Sunday, because he disapproves of the newspaper’s handling of news items relating to refugees and asylum-seekers.
Neil LaBute talks about dealing with reviews in his Thursday diary entry for Slate.
It’s always interesting to me how different artists respond to their critical reception. Some won’t read anything, while others voraciously read it all. Still others have more elaborate lines of defense
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