The Oregon Book Awards will be handed out at a ceremony this Friday. The finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel are:
Marc Acito: How I Paid for College
Kassten Alonso: Core
Phillip Margolin: Lost Lake
Kris Nelscott: War at Home
Michael Strelow: The Greening of Ben Brown
In short fiction, the finalists are:
Barry Lopez: Resistance
David Pinson: A Moment To Organize My Face
Both awards for fiction are judged by Mark Weingardner.
Unrest continues to grow in Paris’s banlieues, where North African communities have been ghettoized for the last couple of decades. The current problems were sparked by the death of two teenagers, who were electrocuted at a power station as they allegedly were fleeing police. In Clichy-sous-Bois, rioters burned cars and clashed with security forces.
Anger quickly spread to other suburbs, and the whole thing has turned into another national crisis over what the French call “integration.” (By which they mean the lack of it, really.) Here is a brief article about it on the BBC. You can see it turning into a political race between the conservative Interior Minister Sarkozy (who called the rioters “de la racaille” (i.e. “scum”)) and the somewhat more liberal Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Both ministers, however, have acknowledged unemployment and racial discrimination, and promised to address the issues.
As it happens, I’m reading a novel set in a Paris banlieue at the moment. It’s a translation of Faiza Guene’s much-buzzed debut novel, Kiffe Kiffe Demain. Without revealing too much, I can already say that it’s living up to its hype. But more on this later.
The inimitable George Saunders answers a few questions for Powells.com in this Q&A. Tiny sample:
Favorite Food: Pizza from Traverso’s, Orland Park, Illinois
Favorite Exercise: Getting up to stumble leadenly away from the table at Traverso’s.
Special Power: Gradually wasting all my once special powers and gradually fading away to a shadow of my former self, then going to Traverso’s.
Read them all here.
The Buffalo News has a profile of Joyce Carol Oates that provides a couple of interesting tidbits, e.g. her reaction to the Nobel buzz, a few weeks ago:
Oates’ name has been buzzed about in connection with the Nobel for several years now, but she wasn’t expecting any break-of-dawn phone calls from Sweden.
“I did not think at all that I was going to win. I don’t think an American will win that award while we’re in Iraq,” said Oates. “It’s a political prize. It goes to countries, not people. And I don’t have that kind of profile – I’m not a political person.”
Read the rest here.
Over at the NY Times, William Grimes reviews Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, his new memoir about his uncle and aunt, a fascinating couple he spent time with while studying in London.
“Two Lives” is a curious tale curiously told. Mr. Seth, with ferocious diligence, leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to recreate the childhood and early adulthood of his two protagonists. Much of the material will be of interest only to the Seth family. Swept away by his subject, the author often falls into a dull, chronological re-creation of the biographical record, fleshed out with long historical digressions on, say, the Italian campaign of World War II and reflections on the cruelties of the 20th century. Reluctant to add emotion to emotionally charged facts, Mr. Seth adopts a muted, nearly affectless tone. At times he sounds as if he is merely annotating documents. Actually, he is telling a great love story, involving two remarkable people.
I recently read and reviewed the book for another outlet–more details soon.
Nelson Mandela has launched a series of comic books about his life. The publications are part of a wider literacy campaign in South Africa.
In related news, anti-Apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada, who was also jailed on Robben Island along with Mandela, has recently released his memoirs.