opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 August 2021

11 August: Pushkin House Book Prize shortlist | Giwi Margwelaschwili archive | The Literary Saloon at 19
12 August: Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren controversy | HWA Crown Awards longlists | Numismatic Literary Guild Awards | Malicroix review
13 August: Best YA books of all Time ? | Last Loosening review
14 August: Gordon Burn Prize shortlist | Mo Yan does WeChat
15 August: Gallimard looking to publish recently recovered Céline material | The Tale of Genji translations | On book reviewing
16 August: One less book at the rentrée littéraire | The Aesthetics of Resistance | Royalties in Nepal | Beirut 2020 review
17 August: FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award longlist | Crime Cologne Awards shortlist
18 August: Martin Eden review
19 August: Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalists | Maltese National Book Prize shortlists | Best sci-fi of the past decade ?
20 August: 'Readers of Europe' recommendations | An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg review

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       'Readers of Europe' recommendations

       At the European Council they asked: "staff from the member states' permanent representations to the EU to make recommendations for books to read", and the results are now available in Readers of Europe 2021 -- the full list of recommendations.
       You have to click on each country, but it's an interesting variety.

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

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       An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Alain-Paul Mallard's An Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg, now out in English, from Wakefield Press.

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

       Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalists

       They've announced the finalists for this year's Dayton Literary Peace Prize -- honoring: "writers whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding" -- in both the fiction and non categories.
       The winners will be announced 22 September.

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

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       Maltese National Book Prize shortlists

       The Maltese National Book Council has announced the shortlists for the 2021 National Book Prizes in seven categories.
       Maltese-language works dominated, though the categories appear to be open to both Maltese and English works. There are only two finalists in the novel category -- both in Maltese.

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

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       Best sci-fi of the past decade ?

       They've published the results of the NPR Books Summer Poll 2021, in We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade.
       Crowd-sourced and hence pretty predictable, but not a bad starting-list .

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

       Martin Eden review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jack London's classic, Martin Eden.

       I somehow never got to it when I was the right age for reading London -- younger; a lot younger -- but am glad to have finally done so. It's an interesting mix -- YA-basic on the one hand, Herbert Spencer and Otto Weininger (!) mentions on the other.

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       FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award longlist

       They've announced the fifteen-title-strong longlist for this year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award -- annoyingly only in a paywalled piece at the Financial Times (why ? why ?), but see, for example, Ruth Comerford's report in The Bookseller, FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist revealed.
       The longlist was selected from: "some 600 titles" -- which makes me wonder why they can manage to consider so many titles while the Booker Prize for Fiction manages only about a quarter as many titles (158 novels this year), despite the presumably (much) larger pool .....
       I haven't seen any of these.
       The shortlist will be announced 23 September, and the winner on 1 December.

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

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       Crime Cologne Awards shortlist

       They won't be holding the Crime Cologne festival this year -- but the prize, one of the leading German mystery-prizes, will be awarded, and they've now announced the six-title-storng shortlist; see, for example, the report at Börsenblatt.
       We'll probably be seeing some of these in English translation -- certainly Joachim B. Schmidt's Kalmann, which is forthcoming from Bitter Lemon Press.

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

       One less book at the rentrée littéraire

       The French rentrée littéraire -- the big fall book-dump, when most of the biggest fiction titles are released -- is set to start soon -- but there will be one less book than planned: the courts have come down hard on Fatum by Pascal Herlem -- real hard.
       A 9 August 17e Chambre du tribunal judgement forbids not only the sale of the novel, but even the dissemination of information about it; as the ActuaLitté piece Rentrée littéraire 2021 : la justice française interdit la vente d'un roman reports, the book -- and all information about its contents -- are being disappeared. Yes, real cancel culture !
       Fatum apparently hits too close to home -- the official reason for the ban is invasion of privacy -- though as the article notes, the legal process went unusually quickly, and did not provide either publisher or author the opportunity to respond to the charges.
       Interesting, too, that this is the third in a connected series of novels -- and that apparently no one complained about the first two (which didn't sell particularly well). No doubt, if this one ever does come out, it will attract considerably more attention .....

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

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       The Aesthetics of Resistance

       The English translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss' trilogy, The Aesthetics of Resistance, (finally) came out last year, and it's good to see it getting some coverage, including a review in The New York Review of Books and now Ryan Ruby's lengthy look at Resisting Oblivion: Peter Weiss and the political novel.

       My own review of the work was one of the very early ones at this site; I really should return to it.

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

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       Royalties in Nepal

       At onlinekhabar Nirvik Jung Rayamajhee reports that quite a few authors aren't getting their due -- money-wise --, in Right to royalty a cause for concern in Nepali literature as only a few get their share.

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       Beirut 2020 review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Charif Majdalani's Beirut 2020 -- subtitled: Diary of the Collapse in the US, and The Collapse of a Civilisation, A Journal in the UK.

       Obviously, today attention is on another nation's collapse; sadly, the number of variations on this outcome seem to be proliferating in these times.

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

       Gallimard looking to publish recently recovered Céline material

       I recently mentioned that a great stash of unpublished papers by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been recovered -- and Antoine Gallimard, who runs the eponymous literary juggernaut publisher, is positioning Gallimard for what they think is their due: to get to publish the lot. Variations of Friday's conversation with AFP are all over the French press -- see, for example, Gallimard s'estime «prioritaire» pour la publication des manuscrits retrouvés de Céline at Le Figaro --, and while it doesn't look like a completely done deal (hence, presumably, the interview), Gallimard's case looks pretty good, from the fact they they've long been the author's publisher (and have brought out a ton of his and related works), there's apparently also that agreement signed with the widow regarding any unpublished work (they get to publish it).
       Gallimard expects to remain: "l'éditeur exclusif" of the author -- and I expect they will, too.
       No doubt, considerable editing will need to be done; presumably there's also a bit of a sense of urgency: Céline died sixty years ago already, and the clock is ticking fast on French copyright protection of these works .....
       (As to English translations, I'm not holding my breath -- but I hope some US/UK publishers are sniffing around and maybe even considering getting in on the action early (i.e. such as not waiting until the books are actually out in French).)

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

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       The Tale of Genji translations

       At his Tony's Reading List weblog Tony Malone has been posting on the six English translations of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, concluding his overview now with a post on 'The Tale of Genji' -- Ranking the Translations.
       Certainly a helpful quick overview for anyone interested in tackling the classic work.
       (I've long been meaning to review it, but, as with so, so many books, haven't quite gotten around to it yet.)

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

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       On book reviewing

       Yet another minor book-reviewing-in-our-times brouhaha of sorts: the Editors at n+1 recently published a piece on Critical Attrition: What's the matter with book reviews ? -- and then Christian Lorentzen responded, at Gawker, with The Intellectuals Are Having a Situation (who: "found the points it made about book reviewing mostly irrelevant, distracting, and ultimately anti-intellectual").
       Though of course I can never pass up an article about book reviewing, I don't have the energy to weigh in much on these. Still, it's sort of reässuring to see that there are still publications willing to publish pieces on the subject, suggesting interest in some sort of engagement with it. (Or is it just the publications' hope/belief/knowledge that there are enough 'book reviewers' of any and all stripes out there to generate an adequate number of page-views for this sort of thing ?)

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       Gordon Burn Prize shortlist

       They've announced the six-title shortlist for this year's Gordon Burn Prize; it includes both works of fiction and non.
       The winner will be announced 14 October.

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

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       Mo Yan does WeChat

       Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in 2012, but it's been a while since we've seen anything by him in translation; he doesn't seem to have published much in Chinese since then either (though the collection 晚熟的人 did come out last year), but -- nudged by his literary agents and publishers ? -- he's now begun to be active on social media. No, he's not on Twitter yet, or Instagram, but he has apparently joined WeChat -- specifically, to reach a younger audience: see, for example, Zhang Rui's China.org.cn report, Nobel laureate Mo Yan starts blog to communicate with youngsters.
       Among the things he's shared so far: "that he used to smoke while writing, but now prefers to enjoy a tipple".

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

       Best YA books of all Time ?

       Since there can never be enough lists, Time has now published their list of The 100 Best YA Books of All Time.
       In fact, it's sort of an updated list -- apparently they published one of these in 2015, but what they: "didn't know then was how drastically the category -- what it represents, who it serves and whose voices it centers -- was about to shift". As a consequence, we now find:

TIME's updated list of the best YA books of all time is weighted heavily toward the recent past, with more than 50% of the books on the list having been published in the last decade.

       That would seem a bit ... top-heavy, to put it mildly. (In the National Review Sarah Schutte also finds this problematic, in Time Magazine Plays the Prophet.)
       I would also note that the list suggests that the best YA is pretty much only written in English: the list does include Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, but that seems to be about it. I understand Time's audience is very US-centric; nevertheless, this suggests the definition of 'best' heavily weighs in criteria other than quality.
       They do in fact (try to) explain How We Chose the 100 Best YA Books of All Time -- which usefully also includes the 2015 list. (That one was also English-language dominated, but books by Isabel Allende and Cornelia Funke made the cut.)

       (Very little YA literature is covered at the complete review, and I haven't seen, much less read, much on the Time list -- certainly not the titles published in the past ten years -- so I can't presume to judge; still, I don't think this is a list I'd rely on to guide me.)

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

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       Last Loosening review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Walter Serner's Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Aspiring to Become One, out from Twisted Spoon Press last year.

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

       Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren controversy

       The Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren is the leading Dutch-language author prize, awarded every three years and paying out €40,000, and they announced this March that Surinamese author Astrid H. Roemer would get the prize this year. Recent comments of hers about Dési Bouterse -- onetime coup-leader and then Surinamese president from 2010 to 2020 -- have not, however, gone over well, the Comité van Ministers van de Taalunie finding her comments so beyond the pale that they've announced that, while she gets to keep the prize, there will be no official prize ceremony; see also the report at DutchNews.nl, Dutch literary prize ceremony scrapped in controversy over Desi Bouterse.

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

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       HWA Crown Awards longlists

       The (British) Historical Writers' Association has announced the longlists for their HWA Crown Awards in the three categories, fiction, non, and debut.
       The shortlists will be announced 5 October, the winners 24 November.

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

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       Numismatic Literary Guild Awards

       Always interesting to see the more specialized literary awards -- and those of the Numismatic Literary Guild certainly qualify. For those who are coin-interested, they've now announced the winners of this year's awards, in quite a variety of categories.

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

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       Malicroix review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Henri Bosco's 1948 novel Malicroix, out last year from New York Review Books.

       For what it's worth, Bosco was nominated for the Nobel Prize at least four times.

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

       Pushkin House Book Prize shortlist

       They've announced the six-title-strong shortlist for this year's Pushkin House Book Prize, a £10,000 prize for the: "best non-fiction writing on Russia".
       I haven't seen any of these, but it looks like an interesting selection.
       The winner will be announced in late October.

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

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       Giwi Margwelaschwili archive

       The German Literature Archive has announced the acquisition the archive of German-Georgian author Giwi Margwelaschwili, who died last year at the age of 92.
       Only one of his works is under review at the complete review -- Officer Pembry -- but I will definitely be getting to more; Verbrecher Verlag has brought out many of them, with another due out in a few weeks. Disappointingly, none of his work seems to be available in English yet.
       See also his official site.

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       The Literary Saloon at 19

       The complete review went online in the spring of 1999, but this Literary Saloon weblog was only added a few years later, the first post going up on 11 August 2002, exactly nineteen years ago.
       Glad to see you're still checking in, and I hope you continue to find information that's of use and interest here !

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