#Booker award

[booksofdelight]

International Booker Prize Longlist 2024 Announced

Find out the International Booker Prize Longlist 2024!

The 2024 award season is just around the corner. And now the International Booker Prize Longlist 2024 has been announced. This international award celebrates novels and short story collections that are translated to English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. 13 books made the longlist and these books ““speak of courage and kindness, of the vital importance of community, and of the effects…

[sikoazayn]

so happy for tiffany !!

[stefito0o]

A historical win for the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and his book Time Shelter translated in English by Angela Rodel 👏 🇧🇬

[author-a-holmes]

Indie Ink Awards Nominations...

Do you feel Booker & Lizzy are top tier friendship goals?

Do you want to take a few minutes to nominate Changeling for an award?

The Indie Ink Awards are open for book nominations throughout november. All it takes is a few minutes to sign up for an account on https://indiestorygeek.com/

Once you have an account, you can search for your favourite indie books, and click the banner at the top of the book's page and then nominate it in up to FIVE (5) categories. It's just that simple!

If you'd like to learn more about the Indie Ink Awards, or even apply to be a judge, you can head on over to their dedicated website; https://indieinkawards.com/

[uwmspeccoll]

In Memoriam: Hilary Mantel

Today we learned of the passing of beloved author Dame Hilary Mantel. In memoriam, we are sharing a first edition copy of her celebrated novel Wolf Hall, which focuses on the life and career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. Wolf Hall received both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was published in 2009 by Fourth Estate. The sequel, Bring up the Bodies also received the Booker Prize and the third book in the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was longlisted for the same award. She wrote 9 other novels, 2 short story collections, a memoir, and essays and reviews for various outlets. Her work has also been developed for the stage and Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were brought to life in a tv mini-series which aired on the BBC in the UK and PBS Masterpiece Theater in the United States (it is available for streaming through Amazon). 

Our copy of Wolf Hall is signed by Mantel, who used the last line of the book in her inscription: “Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.” It is one of my favorite books, with the other books in this trilogy right up there with it. Mantel will be missed, but we will always have the work she has left behind as her legacy. 

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[desdasiwrites]

If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.

– Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

[music-despite-everything]

Excerpt from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.

---

I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a seashore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.

[bookpillows]

finally a scandal in the publishing world NOT from people being so online

[musingsofmonica]

The Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist

The shortlist has been announced! It features six books by authors never previously shortlisted, including two debuts.

[nandakhil]

Reading and Being a Reader!!

It’s always exciting to start with a new hobby! The moment you begin something, You are hungry to know everything about it. The Rules, The loopholes, the prize, the strength, the weakness, the opportunity that lies and the threats you face in continuing your hobby. And then there comes a point, in persuading your hobby, where you don’t enjoy it anymore and you start thinking about how time flew…

[antonhur]

I translated Sang Young Park's LOVE IN THE BIG CITY into English and got nominated for an International Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award for it.

Ask me anything.

[booksofdelight]

Amazon's Best Books of December

Check out Amazon's Best Books of December!

The last month of 2023 is here and it is the final time we get to celebrate the best books released this year. Keep reading to find out which books Amazon selected as the best books of December. If your goal was to read more this year, then this is your final month to reach your reading goal. You can try reaching your goal with some of Amazon’s recommendations. There are a bunch of new books…

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[soberscientistlife]

Clara Belle Drisdale Williams [1885-1993] was the valedictorian of the graduating class of Prairie New Normal and Independent College, now (Prairie View A & M University) in 1908.

She enrolled at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in the fall of 1928, after taking some courses at the University of Chicago. While she worked as a teacher at Booker T. Washington School in Las Cruces, she also took college courses during the summer.

Many of her professors would not allow her inside the classroom, she had to take notes from the hallway; she was also not allowed to walk with her class to get her diploma.

She married Jasper Williams in 1917; their three sons became physicians. She became a great teacher of black students by day, and by night she taught their parents, former slaves, home economics.

In 1961, New Mexico State University named a street on its campus after Williams; in 2005 the building of the English department was renamed Clara Belle Williams Hall.

In 1980 Williams was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws degree by NMSU, which also apologized for the treatment she was subjected to as a student. She died at 108 years old.

Source African Archives Instagram

[thefrsers]

Caitriona Balfe | The Booker Prize Awards 2023

[mortalityplays]

Only tangentially related to today's ask discourse but I was thinking about this- do you have advice on pushing more out of your comfort zone ie media? I feel like its really easy to say you like or want stuff thats making you uncomfortable or is less palatable to wide audiences etc etc but I have trouble going out of my way to actually experience things like that over more popcorn you know

a good way to start if you're intimidated is to look for curated recommendations close to your cultural comfort zone (I'm focusing on US/UK lists here but you can look for recommendations from museums, libraries, and national award bodies just about anywhere in the world). e.g. the BFI Sight & Sound list or the National Film Registry (for movies), Booker Prize or National Book Award winners for literature

Don't feel like you have to watch/read everything all at once, it's fine to skim for something that sounds particularly up your street and start there. It's also fine to jump right into something intimidating and find out what all the fuss is about! the absolute worst case scenario is that you're bored or underwhelmed and can pick something else next time.

a lot of my film knowledge comes from when I was at university. I discovered that there was an A/V library and viewing room on campus that I could use for free l, so I just looked through the catalogue and started picking out things I'd never seen that sounded interesting. every day between classes I'd go, pick a title, and spend a couple of hours giving it a try. I watched Blade Runner for the first time in a darkened basement booth with headphones on, and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and Wild Strawberries, and Persepolis, and countless other weird and wonderful things. sometimes I picked something incredibly boring or something that annoyed me, but I always came away feeling good that I'd expanded my knowledge of what was out there.

once you do start finding new things you like, a whole other path opens up to you. you can dig deeper into the work of one writer or director or actor, look up interviews and find out who inspired them. if you loved a specific book, see if the author mentioned any direct influences, or if critics compared it to something else you might enjoy. you get to start building these maps in your head and getting a sense for where different things fit, and it becomes easier and easier to hunt for hidden treasures.

finally! if you can find a group of friends (or even just one person) who is interested in taking this journey with you, start a club. take turns to pick something you want to explore, share the journey, and discuss it as you go along. keep sight of your purpose, whether that's to broaden your horizons beyond your home culture, take on more challenging works, or just be better informed. take it a step at a time, and learn to enjoy the experience of exploration even when you don't like something. figuring out why we hated Lady Chatterley's Lover is some of the most fun I've had with our book club yet. introducing friends to The Left Hand of Darkness and getting hype about it with them was just as good. love the process and you'll change your life.