Novelist Joshilyn Jackson and Emory University creative writing professor Joseph Skibell are among the 10 finalists recently announced for the 2012 Townsend Prize for fiction.
The award is given every two years to an outstanding novel or short story collection by a Georgia author. From this year’s list, it appears that the state's literary talent is clustered around Atlanta. Books spanning a range of genres, from Jackson’s popular women’s fiction to Southern Gothic to Skibell’s literary novel set in Freud’s Vienna, are competing for the prize, which carries a $2,000 award.
Acclaimed short story writer and novelist Ann Beattie will speak at the award ...
Can anyone name the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature? He is an octogenarian Swedish psychologist and poet with a huge reputation in his country of nine million -- the Robert Frost of Sweden, according to the editor of the literary magazine Granta. But I imagine that Tomas Transtromer (below) is little known anywhere else. After he won, I remember reading that his American publishers were anxious to put out more copies of his out-of-print volumes of poetry.
So Transtromer is not a world name in literature. But then again, who among living authors is? Many pop stars and ...
“Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008”
By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Alfred A. Knopf, 487 pages.
In the beautifully illustrated pages of “Life Upon These Shores,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor and America’s most prominent black intellectual, has produced an encyclopedia of black history packaged as a kind of coffee-table book. It’s about that size and heft, mixing impressive historical scholarship with profiles of famous and forgotten figures, recalling milestone events, tragedies and seminal moments “to evoke the limitless variety of African American life.” Written as a series of chronological essays, vignettes and sketches, the result is ...
“Nightwoods”
By Charles Frazier. Random House, 272 pages.
The murderer on the loose in Charles Frazier’s latest novel, “Nightwoods,” reminded me of one of the crazed killers Truman Capote wrote about in “In Cold Blood.” Frazier’s story, however, is only superficially about a killer’s blood lust and more sincerely a love song to time and place. The time is the 1960s, a century past the Civil War era that is the setting of Frazier’s outstanding first novel, “Cold Mountain,” winner of the National Book Award, and much beyond the period of “Thirteen Moons,” his second, which was published to mixed ...
“The Submission”
By Amy Waldman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 299 pages.
It’s telling how little the jury knows. Not a single one of the artists, critics or historians assembled to judge a contest for a memorial to victims of the World Trade Center attack recognizes the Islamic aesthetic of the winning design they select from 5,000 anonymous entries. It is an absence of cultural knowledge that ends in public fury when the winner is revealed to be a Muslim American architect named Mohammed Khan. It also symbolizes America’s problem with much of the world: its supreme ignorance of non-Western cultures.
Amy Waldman’s sharp, ...
“Swamplandia!”
By Karen Russell. Vintage Contemporaries, 397 pages.
Ava Bigtree, 13-year-old apprentice alligator wrestler, is the chief storyteller of this wondrous book of the dead. Until her mother Hilola’s death from cancer, Ava and the Bigtree clan lead a charmed existence of make-believe. Masquerading as Indians in buckskin on highway billboards, they are the proprietors of Swamplandia!, an alligator theme park located on their private island in the Everglades. Hilola dazzles tourists nightly by diving into a lagoon full of alligators, and the children are free to run amok when they aren’t busy with chores around the park. Schooling consists of filching ...
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