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Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, announced plans for a Short Story Month celebration.

For every day throughout May, the team will digitally release a new Vintage Short fiction piece. These eBooks will be priced at $0.99 each.

According to the press release, the 31 stories come from a wide array of authors including Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes. The roster also includes five original pieces from writers “Alexander McCall Smith, Carrie Brown, Hari Kunzru, Patricio Pron, and the first-time U.S. publication of an original Maeve Binchy story.” Follow this link to see the full Vintage Shorts calendar.

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Mitali Perkins is the acclaimed author of such books as the middle-grade Jane Addam’s Award Honor Book Rickshaw Girl, which was included in New York Public Library’s 2013 list of ‘100 Great Children’s Books‘, and YA novel … Continue reading ... →

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Some people are compelled by a restlessness from within; others are shaped by the unwieldy forces around them. In Miriam Toews's poignant new novel following two sisters raised in a small Canadian Mennonite community, siblinghood is a bond strengthened by this dynamic. Elf is now a world-famous concert pianist with a happy marriage, while her [...]

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Children notice and point out differences all the time, and it’s natural. But hopefully as we mature, we learn that all individuals are unique and that everyone is “different.”

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In The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of two brothers who share everything as children but begin to pull apart as they grow older. Their childhood is set against a 1960s poverty rebellion known as the Naxalite movement in Calcutta, India. However, the focus here is not politics but rather family, love, duty, truth, [...]

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Goodreads has opened up the voting for its fifth annual Goodreads Choice Awards. The awards include twenty different categories from fiction and poetry to humor and fantasy. Authors Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Wally Lamb have been nominated for Fiction. Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling have both been nominated in the Mystery category.

Here is more about how the books are chosen from the Goodreads blog:

The Goodreads Choice Awards are the only major book awards decided by readers, and we find our nominees from books that our members read and love throughout the year. There’s no judging panel or industry experts. We analyzed statistics from the 250 million books added, rated, and reviewed on the site in 2013 to nominate 15 books in each category. Of course, with hundreds of thousands of books published in 2013, no nominee list could cover the amazing breadth of books reviewed on Goodreads so we also accept write-in votes during the Opening Round to ensure that you can vote for exactly the book you want.

Readers will be able to vote in three rounds of voting. The opening round lasts through November 9. The highest voted titles will make it to the Semifinals which last from November 11 – 16. Readers can vote on the final choices November 18 – 25.

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This year’s Brooklyn Book Festival brought more than three hundred writers to the literary borough.

Brooklyn Borough president and event founder Marty Markowitz boasted that it is now the third largest literary festival in the country.

Each year, the festival recognizes a literary figure whose work embodies the Brooklyn spirit with the Best of Brooklyn, Inc. award (BoBi). Two-time Newbery medalist Lois Lowry won the award this year.

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By Robert Eaglestone

So here’s the first thing about the books on the Booker Prize lists, both short and long: until the end of August, it was hard-to-impossible to get hold of most of them. Only one was in paperback in July (well done, Canongate). And while some were in very pricey hardback, several hadn’t even been published. This begs the question: who is the Booker Prize for? If it’s supposed to encourage wider reading, debate and book sales, that’s hard for us and for bookshops if the books just aren’t available. If people outside the world of media reviewers and publishers can’t read the books – I couldn’t and I teach and write about contemporary fiction – then isn’t this all just a little bit strange? It makes the whole thing seem like a game played by an enclosed elite or (hardback prices being what there are) a publishers trick.

Still, eventually I was able to buy some, including four on the outstanding shortlist. I was sorry Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart didn’t make the cut. A multi-voiced, pitch-perfect account of post-Crash Irish life, I thought this was a wonderful novel, deep things carved small and accurate.

The press is very keen to see Jim Crace win: he is a much underrated novelist and Harvest has a trick the Booker likes – a sinister and unreliable first person narrator. I teach his excellent novel Being Dead, although when I discovered that all the lovely ecological and scientific details in that book were simply made up, somehow the book lost its sheen. Of course, novelists are supposed to invent stuff, but, well, details are details and they make you trust a book. Harvest has the same flaw. It’s a historical novel set… when? Somewhere between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth century? You can’t tell from the language or plot. There’s a threat of witch burning and people in big hats (sixteenth century) but there are also things that are clearly late eighteenth century. The thing is, people do live in a time and their time colours and shapes them. Historical details wouldn’t escape the book’s sharp-eyed narrator. But this blurriness of focus makes one worry about small things: is that how you make vellum, as the narrator does? (no, it’s not, according to Wikipedia); do horses sleep kneeling down (I don’t know, but it’s a crucial clue)? Was it ever actually illegal just to walk across parish boundaries? And then one worries about larger ones: if you can’t trust the book with minor things, can you believe in the motivations, characters, plot? The book somehow floats free of the world and of history, just the things it wants to be about.

In contrast to Crace’s unreliable storyteller, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the narrator of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, is trying to separate what actually happened from what she wished happened and from what other people – rather sinister Evangelists – want to say happened. It’s an odd accompaniment to J. M. Coetzees’s The Childhood of Jesus, also published this year, which focusses on a Joseph-like figure, transposed to an unnamed country. This very short novel – also a historical novel of sorts – is incredibly intense and really rather beautiful, and less controversial than the press presents it, I think.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names is also narrated in the first person: a child growing up in Zimbabwe. Children’s voices are hard to do, but this novel gets the tone and level of detail just right. In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a savage satirical piece called ‘How to Write about Africa’, attacking stereotypical representations in fiction and the first half of this novel does rather fall foul of this: however, as the book goes on and especially after the narrator emigrates, it turns into something more challenging, reminding me of work by the great Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta.

At the core of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for Time Being is another first person narrator: Nao, a Tokyo teenager, dealing with a range of problems. Her sections are brilliantly written (and when the novel turns to the other narrator, the authorial Ruth, it sags a little). The core of this very contemporary novel is the interconnectedness of things, and in it, stories uncover stories, trauma uncovers trauma, discussions of zen lead to discussions of physics, of philosophy and of the heart. It could have done with more Ruth-less editing – it’s too long, as if the author was desperate to cram in more and more – but apart from that it really grows on one.

I’ve not read the much praised and just published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (832 pages long…) but the start – again, a historical novel – looks promising. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, again, just published, seems to be getting good reviews.

Overall, then, three historical novels (even if one is a bit unfixed in time), three and a half (Nao is the half!) first person narrators, and, as everyone has said, a very culturally and geographically diverse field. Interestingly, religion features significantly in the four of them I’ve read (Mary, obviously; Crace’s narrator makes much of the village’s unbuilt church; Bulawayo’s narrator is involved with Christian fundamentalists and a lot of Ozeki’s book concerns Zen Buddhism). Perhaps there’s something in the water.

Robert Macfarlane is an outstanding literary critic (and writer) and his committee has produced one of the most interesting lists for years, one which brilliantly shows off the aesthetic and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary Anglophone writing. Still having two to read, I’m not going to predict anything, but any of the novels I’ve mentioned above would be great winners. They, and most of the long list (especially Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Richard House’s The Kill, and Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English), would spark fascinating reading group conversations and are well worth picking up.

It would have been even better (for the general reader, for the bookshops) if we could have read them all first, though.

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (and formerly Director) of the Holocaust Research Centre. His research interests are in contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy, and on Holocaust and genocide studies. He is the author of Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013) and Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (third revised edition) (Routledge, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter: @BobEaglestone.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: Jim Crace at the 2009 Texas Book Festival, 2009. Larry D. Moore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post On the Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist appeared first on OUPblog.

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The Man Booker shortlist has been revealed for 2013. We’ve collected free samples of many of the books on the list below–what do you think?

The winner will be announced on October 15th.

We also collected free samples of all the longlisted books and wrote about one longlisted book that was rejected 47 times.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Journalist and author Pete Hamill won the annual Best of Brooklyn, Inc. (BoBi) Award, a prize the recognizing a literary figure whose work embraces  the Brooklyn spirit. In the video embedded above, Hamill spoke about the honor.

This past Sunday, readers from all over New York City headed to the seventh annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Since its inception, the festival has grown dramatically; this year’s event boasted more than 280 author appearances and scheduled more than 104 panels.

Here’s more from the release: “The eldest son of Irish immigrant parents, Pete Hamill was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He left school at age 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and attend night classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School with the intent of becoming a comic book artist. After service in the U.S. Navy, he began his career as a journalist, and over the ensuing decades covered both domestic and international wars and conflicts. Hamill is the author of 18 books, including the best-selling A Drinking Life, the novels Snow in August, Tabloid City and Forever, and a collection of short stories, The Christmas Kid, to be released in October. He also served as editor-in-chief of the New York Post and the New York Daily News.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I have to share this brilliant piece from The New York Times Sunday Review, March 18, 2012, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri. I powerfully identified with every word, thought, sentence.

In it, she expresses her core-deep love of sentences. Everything about this piece confirms, echoes, and expands upon my own feelings as a writer. Because this is where I come from, too — perhaps with less grace and craft, Lahiri writes so beautifully — for I have the exact same relationship to reading and writing. It’s about the sentences.

Though we’re told that Lahiri’s piece is part of a series about “the art and craft of writing,” it is just as much about reading. Perhaps more so. Teachers, librarians, editors, readers, please check out it.

Art by Jeffrey Fisher.

Here’s the opening . . .

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be.

As I’ve said many times on this blog, that’s exactly how I still read — with pen in hand, underlining sentences, making marks, asterisks and exclamation points, my beloved marginalia. But the thought that really had me nodding my head in agreement was how the best sentences make me stop reading. I look up from the page, thinking, feeling, dreaming. It’s counter-intuitive. We want readers to keep turning the pages, right? To devour the book, consume it. Well, maybe not. Sometimes we want them to slow down, to stop altogether.

From my copy of Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

That’s why, I think, that I’m so often uncomfortable when I encounter the counters and the tickers, the well-meaning folks who inform us how they read exactly 214 books this year and so on. I don’t mean to insult anyone, but I’m so tired of the idea of quantity.

Pause and reflection, that’s reading too.

Of course, there are different kinds

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Truth be told, I'm still struggling in these parts, and hence the sluggishness of my blog presence.  I do hope to regain my perky self (Was I ever perky? Is it even appropriate at my age to be perky?).  But between now and then, I would like to share two news items (both from the New York Times) that friends have sent my way.  My taste, my interests must be verging on the transparent.

Story number one:  Draft.  This is the new Times Opinionator feature that promises "essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing—from the comma to the tweet to the novel—and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age."  Jhumpa Lahiri's gorgeous piece "My Life's Sentences" recalled, for the ever-lovely Melissa Sarno, a piece I had written here, about my obsession with the construct.  (Thank you, Melissa, for making me famous today.)

Story number two:  Your Brain on Fiction.  This Annie Murphy Paul essay on reading and the effects it has on our brains reinforces what those of us who have defended lies and lie telling (well, we have defended novels) have been saying all along:  "Reading great literature...enlarges and improves us as human beings."

I personally think the "great" matters in that Annie Murphy Paul essay.  Which takes me straight back to my obsession with crafting fine sentences.  Not easy sentences.  Not obvious ones.  Not the ones you've seen plenty of times before.  But the ones that make us think.

Thank you, Melissa, Mandy, Paul, and Bonnie for making sure I see the good stuff.  Thank you, Melissa, for pairing me with Jhumpa herself.

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If you're in the NYC area (or can get there) on Saturday, November 14, consider visiting the Asian American Literary Festival.

They have a wide range of events. It's a relative bargain at $5 per reading and $20 for an all day pass (10 readings), particularly given the talks that they've organized. Intrigued? Check out the Asian American Literary Festival website at http://pageturnerfest.org/
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Here are the talks on my list, descriptions lifted from the Asian American Literary Festival website. Glance at the schedule and come up with your own list.

Hard-Boiled India: Stories from the Delhi Noir anthology

The New EclecticsPlus, Jhumpa Lahiri will talk about her latest work Unaccustomed Earth.

The Asian American Literary Festival is organized by The Asian American Writers' Workshop, a nonprofit literary arts organization that was started in 1991 to promote and support writers, literature and community. The Asian American Writers' Workshop is located at 16 West 32nd St, Suite 10A, New York, NY 10001.

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