Latest news with #literaryfiction
The Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald
Booker Prize 2025 longlist announced
The 13 titles longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize have been selected by the 2025 judging panel chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is regarded as the leading award for high-quality literary fiction written in English. 'Some of [the books] examine the past and others poke at our shaky present. They are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises,' Doyle said about the nominated novels. Doyle is joined on the judging panel by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power, Kiley Reid and Sarah Jessica Parker. The 2025 longlist includes titles penned by authors representing four continents and nine countries: Albania, Canada, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, the UK and the US. It features two debut novels, Ledia Xhoga's Misinterpretation and Maria Reva's Endling . Six debut novels have won the Booker in its 56-year history, the most recent being Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain . According to the Booker Prize website: 'The nominated novels encapsulate a vast range of international experiences. Arguably more than any other year in the prize's history, this year's longlist boasts a truly global outlook.' The complete list of longlisted titles are: For the first time, the shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event to be held at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall in London on September 23.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Playful Story Collection Unbound From Realism or Form
AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS: Stories, by Ed Park Fifteen years after his comical debut novel, 'Personal Days,' skewered white-collar work culture in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the writer and editor Ed Park published a second novel that reached beyond mundane office realities. Inventive, dense and more than 500 pages long, 'Same Bed Different Dreams' was a demanding literary collage of spy and metafiction devices, real and manufactured South Korean and Korean American history, and pop culture. It went on to become a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for its energy, ambition and sly humor. Now Park's third book is out, a collection called 'An Oral History of Atlantis' whose 16 stories are similarly unbound by run-of-the-mill realism. Like 'Same Bed Different Dreams,' it is a pastiche of forms and nods to genre fiction, from commentaries on campy sci-fi movies to middle-aged dissections of long-gone relationships to indignant epistolary rebukes. The tales often adopt a knowing, nerd-chic irony. Characters with names like Bethany Blanket and Vernon Bodily are rendered in prose full of writerly self-deprecation and mock hipsterdom: In Portland my handler, Jonas, took me to lunch at a locavore haunt that featured seafood haggis and artisanal jelly beans. Park's flash fictions can be capsules of wit. In one, a man lists the antic behaviors of his medicated wife in a series of repeated assertions: 'The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies.' The introductory story, 'A Note to My Translator,' is a critique by a disgruntled novelist of an arbitrary translation of one of his books. His lofty, antiquated diction and ego reminded me instantly of Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire': Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘If You Love It, Let It Kill You' turns navel-gazing into art
A few weeks ago, David Brooks ran out of things to write about in the New York Times and so decided to pour more water over some old tea bag about the death of literary fiction. 'America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,' he wrote, and 'the public taste is occupied with their trash.' No — wait — that was Nathaniel Hawthorne back in 1855, but you get the idea. Our latest novels, Brooks wrote, have grown timid and insular. As someone who's been reviewing fiction every week for three decades and often feels moved and dazzled, I could sense a rebuttal swelling in my evidently easily pleased brain. Just over the last few months, Bruce Holsinger's 'Culpability' tackled the ethical implications of AI, Susan Choi's 'Flashlight' explored the abiding tragedy of North Korea, Karen Russell's 'The Antidote' conjured up a magical tale of environmental destruction in the American West, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Dream Count' followed the intertwined lives of women in the United States and Africa. Timid and insular, sir? I think not. But it was then, perched atop my high dudgeon, that I noticed I was reading Hannah Pittard's 'If You Love It, Let It Kill You.' Pittard, as you may know from her 2023 memoir, 'We Are Too Many,' is an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. Now she's written a novel about an English professor in Kentucky whose husband cheated on her. It sounds like the kind of book you'd want to keep on the bottom shelf if you had to debate David Brooks about the ambition and audacity of contemporary American fiction. At times, you might even wonder whose side Pittard is on. Early in 'If You Love It,' the narrator admits, 'I'm a chronicler of the everyday mundanities of life.' She imagines her students complaining, 'Where's the plot?' Her partner tells her, 'You're a family of navel gazers.' He's not wrong, but that Brooksian dismissal hardly tells the whole story, because the success of such a novel depends on the navel and the gazer. For all its quirky self-referentiality and cramped plot, 'If You Love It' is an account of female anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction. For decades, male anxiety, depression and sexual dissatisfaction passed as capacious themes for fiction (See: 20th-century novels by White guys named John). That such audacious writers as Pittard, Kate Folk, Ada Calhoun and Miranda July are turning those themes on the lathes of their own sharp fiction isn't just fair play, it's cause for celebration. Pittard's special contribution is her ability to braid strands of pathos and comedy. The melancholy narrator, an avatar of the author trimmed down to 'Hana,' feels besieged by the close presence of family, including her sister's household next door; her severely unbalanced father, who wants to be a charming character in one of her books; her eccentric mother, who's dating three men simultaneously online; and her partner's 11-year-old daughter, who has surely heard Hana say she doesn't like kids. What's worse, Hana has just learned that her ex-husband is about to publish a novel about their ruined marriage that portrays her as a smug, insecure hack. The publisher will be using her full name in the publicity material. 'You can't use fiction as a means of making false accusations about living people,' Hana says. 'It's unethical. Fiction isn't a platform for revenge.' These indignant lines are funnier if you're tuned into the literary kerfuffle that's been rumbling between Pittard and her ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, who did, in fact, publish a novel last year called 'Set For Life' inspired by their ruined marriage. But what's pertinent to most readers is that this story follows a mad woman, a woman mad at life, who lives too much in her head, is dogged by erratic erotic urges and suspects there might be something troubling about her desire to play dead. 'It's all happening too quickly,' she thinks, 'and it couldn't be over too soon.' Hana's humor keeps rolling over these adamantine terrors like waves, but periodically when that tide of comedy pulls back, we find ourselves stranded with a middle-aged woman crying, 'oh my god this is not what my life was supposed to be, is it?' At such moments, 'If You Love It,' feels almost too heartbreaking to bear. But Pittard doesn't leave us there. For one thing, Hana imagines her writing students critiquing her story as it takes place. And they aren't particularly kind — 'Is this some sort of plot device?' they ask impatiently. Hana doesn't hold back on them, either. She portrays her students as chronically unimaginative writers always pestering her for permission to add vampires and talking cats to their work. Until, what do you know, a particularly acerbic kitten paws into Hana's life and starts mewing no-nonsense advice. And with that surreal intrusion, 'If You Love It' tilts another few degrees away from reality's plumb line. If memoir is that pious figure who vows to tell the truth and then lies, autofiction is the cheeky kid who wants extra credit for confessing her deceit up front. Is Pittard working through her own private catastrophes in this novel? Of course — but so is every other novelist. She's just letting us see the splintered timbers of her experience clearly enough to recognize our own. 'This book,' Hana tells us, is 'neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life.' And what is that, really, besides the long struggle to understand — and appreciate — that we're all characters in each other's stories. Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.'
Irish Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Books in brief: Eat The Ones You Love, The Book of Records, and Peatlands: A Journey Between Land and Water
Eat The Ones You Love By Sarah Maria Griffin Titan, £9.99 In the 'kip' that is the Woodbine Mall, 'an aspiration towards American luxury ambience transplanted deep in the veins of the Northside Dublin suburbs', a hungry orchid notes a new arrival. Thirtysomething Shell is immediately drawn towards Neve, a beautiful florist whose connection to the murderous plant ended her last relationship, and to the small community of retail workers in the dying centre. Griffin, no stranger to deliciously weird fiction set in haunted, shadowy versions of Dublin, moves into the queer botanical horror subgenre with skill. Her lyricism, if occasionally overwrought, tangoes with a distinctive millennial argot – part therapy jargon, part extremely-online shorthand. Pleasing commentary on class and a sharp eye on the bathos of late-stage capitalism supports but never overwhelms this compelling, gorily gorgeous novel. Claire Hennessy The Book of Records By Madeleine Thein Granta, £20 'The stories that last are the ones about voyages, about odysseys and escapes,' the father of seven-year-old Lina tells her. The pair have escaped China, to seek refuge at 'the Sea', a 'no man's land', rumoured to be a former military outpost. So begins a Beckettian style game of waiting, waiting, waiting. The Booker-shortlisted Canadian author weaves a tale of migration, with the biographies of historical figures, philosopher Hannah Arendt, scholar Baruch Spinoza and the great Chinese poet Du Fu, to explore the existential questions of legacy, truth, memory and the meaning of a good existence. Thein writes with an intellectual mind and a philosophical core that will appeal to readers who appreciate a story of great scope, penned with the fine brush stroke of poetry. Brigid O'Dea Peatlands: A Journey Between Land and Water By Alys Fowler Hodder Press, £20 Bogs are 'strange, funny beings' for the gardener and horticulturalist Alys Fowler, and peat has haunted her imagination for many years. On her quest seeking information on peatlands, she explores parts of Britain and Ireland. Her Irish journey starts in the Wicklow mountains and takes her to Carlow, on to a farm in Co Offaly, and over to Roundstone Bog in Connemara where she finds its heart beating strongly. Her book is a call to sink deep into the dark earth of rugged places, look closely at dragonflies, birds, amphibians and plants that live within them; but also to befriend the fragile, under-pressure bogs, to honour them, learn their mysteries, feel their spirit, and help create a sea-change in attitudes. Paul Clements
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Literature Lost Its Mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find Mary McCarthy and John O'Hara. From a recent Substack essay called 'The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction' by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime' was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint' was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' was No. 3 in 1958, and Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' was No. 1. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number of people who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher's Weekly yearly top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn't know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' As a result of this assumption, novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Literary talk was so central that even some critics got famous: Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin and before them Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. There were vastly more book review outlets, in newspapers across the country and in influential magazines like The New Republic. Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. As Yingling points out, the decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet was dominant. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
