opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 June 2022

11 June: Costa Book Awards | Chetan Bhagat Q & A | Gentlemen Callers review
12 June: Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize
13 June: Premio Strega Europeo | Future Library ceremony and symposium | The ethics of ... autocriticism ?
14 June: EBRD Literature Prize | European Review of Books | 2312 review
15 June: A.B.Yehoshua (1936-2022) | Translation from ... Assamese
16 June: Women's Prize for Fiction | Flowers of Lhasa review
17 June: Sebald Lecture | New Korean Literature Now | Forward Prizes for Poetry shortlists
18 June: Walter Scott Prize | Death on Gokumon Island review
19 June: Harry Potter oral history | Tomb Of Sand Q & A
20 June: Best Australian novels of the last 25 years ? | Finnegans Wakes review

go to weblog

return to main archive

       Best Australian novels of the last 25 years ?

       At The Age Melanie Kembrey offers a list of The 25 best Australian novels of the last 25 years
       The only title under review at the complete review is True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey.

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

---

       Finnegans Wakes review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Patrick O'Neill's Finnegans Wakes: Tales of Translation, recently from the University of Toronto Press

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

       Harry Potter oral history

       In The Guardian Lisa Allardice has an entertaining piece on ‘There was practically a riot at King’s Cross’: an oral history of Harry Potter at 25.

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

---

       Tomb of Sand Q & A

       At Scroll.in Vighnesh Hampapura has a lengthy 'free-wheeling chat with International Booker Prize winners Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell' -- the author and the translator of Tomb of Sand --, in ‘We’re both very superstitious’: Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell get candid about ‘Tomb Of Sand’.

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

       Walter Scott Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and it is News Of The Dead, by James Robertson.
       See also the Hamish Hamilton publicity page or get your copy at Amazon.co.uk; there does not appear to be a US edition yet.

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

---

       Death on Gokumon Island review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Yokomizo Seishi's classic mystery, Death on Gokumon Island, now out in English, from Pushkin Press.

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

       Sebald Lecture

       Lydia Davis gave this year's Sebald Lecture a couple of weeks ago. The transcript does not appear to be available online yet, but you can now watch it here.
       (It's been up a week -- and there are only 103 views ?!?? Disappointing.)

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

---

       New Korean Literature Now

       The Summer 2022 issue of Korean Literature Now is now available online -- in, once again, somewhat new form/presentation.

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

---

       Forward Prizes for Poetry shortlists

       They've announced the shortlists for this year's Forward Prizes for Poetry, "the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland".

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

       Women's Prize for Fiction

       They've announced the winner of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction, and it is The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
       See also the publicity pages at Canongate and Penguin Books, or get your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org or Amazon.co.uk.

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

---

       Flowers of Lhasa review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Tsering Yangkyi's Flowers of Lhasa, just out from Balestier Press.
       There are very few translations of Tibetan fiction available in English -- this is only the third under review at the complete review -- so it is certainly good to see.

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

       A.B.Yehoshua (1936-2022)

       Israeli author A.B.Yehoshua has passed away; see, for example, the obituary by Joseph Berger in The New York Times.
       Only one of his books is under review at the complete review -- The Retrospective.

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

---

       Translation from ... Assamese

       At Outlook India Syeda Ambia Zahan has a short Q & A with a former director of the National Book Trust, Regional Literature Needs Quality Translators: Assam Poet Rita Chowdhury.
       One surprising observation:

But when we directly translate an Assamese book into English, mostly we lose the essence because of lack of quality translators, barring a few. It is better, if we go through a ‘via language’ process. For example, if we translate an Assamese book into Hindi first then it becomes easier to get quality translation work from Hindi into English because there are lots of quality Hindi-language translators who have good command over both Hindi and English. The problem with most Assamese translators is that if one has a good grasp of English, he or she might not have the same grasp on the Assamese language.

       I don't know that I've ever heard the case made that it's better to translate second-hand .....

       (There is currently only one translation from Assamese under review at the complete review, Rajanikanta Bordoloi's Miri Jiyori. I'd certainly love to see and cover some more contemporary work.)

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

       EBRD Literature Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's EBRD Literature Prize, "which celebrates the very best in translated literature from the nearly 40 countries where the Bank invests", and it is The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.

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

---

       European Review of Books

       The European Review of Books has now launched its first issue
       A lot of material here -- and neat to see that quite a few of the pieces are available in two languages.
       And they do also have reviews of a number of books !

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

---

       2312 review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312.

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

       Premio Strega Europeo

       I missed this a couple of weeks ago, but they've announced the winners of this year's Premio Strega Europeo, a leading Italian prize for a work in translation, with this year's prize shared by translations of Amélie Nothomb's Premier Sang and Mikhail Shishkin's The Light and the Dark.

       Previous winners of this relatively new prize -- it was first awarded in 2014 -- include Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter (2021) and Annie Ernaux's The Years (2016).

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

---

       Future Library ceremony and symposium

       The Future Library in Norway has, since 2014, famously been collecting manuscripts from well-known authors that will only be published in 2114, on paper made from recently planted trees in a nearby forest.
       Apparently, authors have been unable to hand off their manuscripts since 2018, so the latest three -- by My Struggle-author Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), Ocean Vuong (2020), and Nervous Conditions-author Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021) -- all dropped theirs off together, yesterday.
       Today, there will be a Symposium -- with, for example, David Mitchell, Sjón, and Rob Young discussing: 'Vertical Labyrinths: Rewriting Time' -- as well as the grand opening of the 'silent room' where the manuscripts will now be kept and on (locked) display.

       (Updated - 15 June): See now also Rosie Goldsmith's report in The Guardian, Future Library opens secret archive of unseen texts in Oslo (though of course what was 'opened' wasn't the actual archive (i.e. the material), but the room housing it).

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

---

       The ethics of ... autocriticism ?

       At Practical Ethics Mette Leonard Høeg considers Can a Character in an Autobiographical Novel Review the Book in Which She Appears ? On the Ethics of Literary Criticism.
       Høeg writes:

I suggest that some literary works call for precisely a literary criticism that is personal and based on the critic’s experiences with the author and the reality it presents. I propose to use the term autotheoretical criticism, or, simply, autocriticism, to designate a genre or kind of literary of criticism which foregrounds the critic’s personal relation to the author of the reviewed work and which is based on the view that such a personal/private connection is relevant, if not even necessary in order to adequately assess the reality-referencing and confessional project of the many works in contemporary literature that blend fiction and autobiography, i.e. to criticise such genre-blending works according to the parameters they themselves set out.

       Oh, good, more terminology .....
       Anyway, I'm very much hoping never to be in a position where I have to consider this. I could also do without ever seeing "criticism which foregrounds the critic’s personal relation to the author of the reviewed work".

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

       Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, awarded for a translation into English from any living European language, and it is Nancy Naomi Carlson's translation of Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude by Khal Torabully.
       See also the Seagull Books publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org or Amazon.co.uk.

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

       Costa Book Awards

       From 1971 to 2005 they were the Whitbread Book Awards, in recent years they've been the Costa Book Awards -- and now, they are no more: as sponsor Costa Coffee has announced, Costa Book Awards ends after 50 amazing years.
       This seems to have come pretty much out of the blue. Usually sponsors let it be known that they don't want to pay up any longer, and prizes go in search of new money, but apparently they decided pretty much just to pull the plug here.
       A lot of fine books won the award over the years -- and the book-of-the-year prize, pitting the category winners, which has been around since the mid-1980s, at least set it apart from the other big UK prizes.

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

---

       Chetan Bhagat Q & A

       In the Star of Mysore Sujata Rajpal has a Q & A with One night @ the call center-author Chetan Bhagat, ‘India Loves Caste System, Even Literature Has One’.

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

---

       Gentlemen Callers review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Corinne Hoex's Gentlemen Callersr, recently out from Dalkey Archive Press.

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

previous entries (1 - 10 June 2022)

archive index

- search the site -

- return to top of the page -

© 2022 the complete review


Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links