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Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://compulsivereader.com
Volume 24, Issue 3, 1 March 2022
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IN THIS ISSUE
New Reviews at Compulsive Reader
Literary News
Competition News
Sponsored By
Coming soon
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Hello readers. Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:
A review of A Better Class of People by Robert Lopez
Here there is heartache and trauma and humanity. There is detachment and longing and grief. Maybe we need to expand the umbrella that covers a “better class” of people. Or maybe, our narrator is accurate when, early in the book, he asserts, “Everyone I know is horrible.” Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/25/a-review-of-a-better-class-of-people-by-robert-lopez/
A review of Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Cold Enough for Snow is a deeply beautiful novel, richly potent in its themes, while resisting simple explication. It reads quickly, driven forward by the tension between presence and absence, love and shame, caring and being cared for, past and present, belonging and otherness, while its meaning unfolds slowly, lingering. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/21/a-review-of-cold-enough-for-snow-by-jessica-au/
A review of Ox in Metal by Jennifer Maiden
It’s as if there’s a dream-universe in which the characters continue to develop like a series—they meet and talk, referencing previous situations and combining those with what is happening in the real public and political spectrum. The effect is both stimulating and unsettling, as the characters are both representative and self-contained. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/20/a-review-of-ox-in-metal-by-jennifer-maiden/
A review of Pretend I Don’t Exist by Morgan Bell
Pretend I Don’t Exist is a delight to read – the kind of book a parent can have a lot of fun reading to a child (or vice versa) but also one that tells a serious and important story about the beauty of animal sentience, the rich interplay of the human and the natural, animate world, and perhaps most importantly, the precariousness of the latter, particularly when it comes to koalas who are increasingly vulnerability, facing a significant and rapidly increasing loss of habitat. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/17/a-review-of-pretend-i-dont-exist-by-morgan-bell/
A review of Off Limits by Louise Wakeling
Wakeling writes lines methodically, in a measured way, never letting her words race ahead of her intended message, whether she is writing about underground stormwater pipes, a power station or the underbelly of a secret Sydney. The poet filters ordinary experiences and places through vibrant images and poignant words.The poet brings to the front paradigms of life and the world, sometimes her observations are like theorems others like syllogisms and others like a work of art. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/16/a-review-of-off-limits-by-louise-wakeling/
Tree Stumps Adorn Their Graves: A Conversation with Author Javier Sinay and Translator Robert Croll
about The Murders of Moisés Ville
In The Murders of Moisés Ville, award-winning journalist Javier Sinay investigates a series of murders from the late nineteenth century, unearthing the complex history and legacy of Moisés Ville, the “Jerusalem of South America,” and his personal family connection to a little-known period of Jewish history in Argentina, linked to his great-grandfather Mijl Hacohen Sinay. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/15/tree-stumps-adorn-their-graves-a-conversation-with-author-javier-sinay-and-translator-robert-croll-about-the-murders-of-moises-ville/
A review of Count Four: Poems by Keith Kopka
These speakers, Kopka’s tellers – their attitudes – interest me more than anything else. They seem to hurt, as if they live as emotionally bruised, successful failures whose memories of fathers and mothers, family, course the past coming in on the writer’s desire to tell all – and more – to live to play music so close to grieving, I want to wince then sigh for the horrific plight joy brings alive on the planet. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/11/a-review-of-count-four-poems-by-keith-kopka/
A review of Greedy Cow by Fiona Sinclair
The collection opens with Sinclair’s humorous experiences with internet dating, from the pervy responses to her profile picture to flirting with emoticons; “over the week I virtual two time / men from Rochester and Deal.” Soon enough, though, she begins a relationship with a man – “our steps synchronize like Fred and Ginger” – and over time they adjust to one another. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/05/a-review-of-shaky-town-by-lou-mathews/
A review of Shaky Town by Lou Mathews
In Shaky Town, Mathews expertly shows us how things work and why they break down, taking apart and putting back together a range of small, yet fully felt lives. His overlapping worlds are mapped in prose that shimmers like hammered copper. He knows this territory well: you don’t doubt that when a certain bug shrinks the leaves of a eugenia hedge, more of a morose neighbor’s sad guitar music will bleed through. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/05/a-review-of-shaky-town-by-lou-mathews/
A review of A Critical Inquiry: Text, Context and Perspectives by Sutanuka Ghosh Roy
The section Indian English Poetry is quite daring in its inclusion of all modern age poets like, Adil Jussawalla, Sanjeev Sethi, Meena Kandasamy and Vihang A. Naik. Mostly, she looks for a hint of a world other than the real, mundane workaday world in the creations of these poets. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/02/a-review-of-a-critical-inquiry-text-context-and-perspectives-by-sutanuka-ghosh-roy/
An interview with Tessa Wegert
The author of Dead Wind talks about her latest book, her protagonist Senior Investigator Shana Merchant, on writing a crime series, the Thousand Islands setting of the series, the attraction of putting a contemporary spin on classic, Agatha Christie-style detective fiction, PTSD, and more. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/02/01/an-interview-with-tessa-wegert/
All of the reviews and interviews listed above are available at The Compulsive Reader on the front page. Older reviews and interviews are kept indefinitely in our extensive (and growing) categorized archives (currently at 2,908, which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.
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LITERARY NEWS
In the literary news last month, Swansea University in Wales has announced the longlist for its £20,000 Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the world’s largest literary prizes for young writers. Launched in 2006, the prize recognises the best published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or under. The list includes: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth), What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree Bailey (Yale University Press), Keeping the House by Tice Cin (And Other Stories) , Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe (Faber), The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris (Little, Brown), No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead), Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove), Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley (Algonquin), Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (Black Cat), Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan (Little, Brown), Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead), and Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead). The shortlist will be announced on March 31, and winners will be announced at a ceremony held in Swansea on May 12.
A longlist has been released for the €100,000 (about $144,155) International Dublin Literary Award, which is sponsored by Dublin City Council to honor a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations include 30 novels in translation, spanning 19 languages, with works nominated by 94 libraries from 40 countries around the world. The shortlist will be announced March 22 and the winner named May 19, as part of the opening day program of International Literature Festival Dublin. Check out the complete International Dublin Literary Award longlist here: https://dublinliteraryaward.ie/news/dublin-city-council-announces-the-2022-dublin-literary-award-longlist-of-library-nominations/
The Audio Publishers Association has announced the finalists for the 2022 Audie Awards, which recognizes distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. Among the finalists are Cynthia Erivo, Dave Grohl, Leslie Jordan, John Lithgow, Lin-Manual Miranda, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey. Winners will be announced at the Audie Awards ceremony on March 4, hosted by Kal Penn. The full list of finalists can be seen here: https://www.audiopub.org/winners/2022-audies-1
Kevin Barry won the £10,000 (about $13,680) Edge Hill Prize, honoring a published, single-authored collection of short stories in the U.K. and Ireland, for That Old Country Music, the Bookseller reported. He is the first writer in the award’s 15-year history to win for a second time. Alice Ash won the £1,000 (about $1,365) Reader’s Choice Award, chosen by staff and students at Edge Hill University, for Paradise Block. Kashyap Raja, a creative writing Masters student at Edge Hill University, won the MA Prize for Epiphany.
The three finalists for the $20,000 Story Prize are: Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King (Grove Press), Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon (Graywolf Press), and Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books). The winner of the prize will be announced the evening of Wednesday, April 13, at a private event that will be livestreamed. The event will feature readings by and interviews with the three finalists, followed by the announcement of the winner and acceptance of the $20,000 top prize and an engraved silver bowl. The runners-up each receive $5,000.
C.J. Sansom is the recipient of the 2022 CWA Diamond Dagger, which is sponsored by the Crime Writers’ Association and recognizes “authors whose crime writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence, and who have made a significant contribution to the genre.” Noting that Sansom is one of Britain’s bestselling historical novelists, the CWA said he combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution (2003), which “was an immediate bestseller, and critical success…. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reign of Henry VIII and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. Now running to well over four million copies in print, it is one of the most successful crime series of all time. After Dissolution came Dark Fire, which won the 2005 Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger.”
Megan Marshall has won the BIO Award, given by the Biographers International Organization to “a distinguished colleague who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.” Marshall is author of three biographical works: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction; and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a finalist for the Christian Gauss Prize in Literary Criticism of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Marshall will give the keynote address at the 2022 BIO Conference on Saturday, May 14.
Eight literary translators shared £19,000 (about $25,990) in awards at the Society of Authors’ annual Translation Prizes, with Sarah Death winning for the third time by taking home the Bernard Shaw Prize for her translation of Letters from Tove by Tove Jansson, edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson. Prizes were awarded for translations from Swedish, Spanish, Arabic, German, French, Dutch, as well as for a debut literary translation from any language, with the winners announced in an online ceremony sponsored by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Check out the complete list of SoA Translation winners here: https://societyofauthors.org/News/News/2022/February/Translation-Prizes-winners-announcement
Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University have announced the 2022 shortlists for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards, which come with a $25,000 purse, are given annually to two winners to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. The Lukas Book Prize, which comes with a $10,000 purse, recognizes excellence in nonfiction writing on a topic of American political or social concern. And the Lynton History Prize, which comes with a $10,000 purse, is awarded to a book-length work of narrative history on any subject. Among this year’s 15 shortlisted authors across all three prizes are Andrea Elliot, Noah Feldman, May Jeong, Patrick Radden Keefe, and Tiya Miles. Winners and finalists will be announced on March 16, and the awards will be presented at a ceremony on May 3. The full shortlists can be found here: https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-journalism-school-announces-2022-j-anthony-lukas-prize-project-awards-shortlists
Have a great month!
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COMPETITION NEWS
Congratulations to Andrew Beck who won a copy of Dead Wind by Tessa Wegert.
Our new site giveaway is for a copy of The Daddy Chronicles by Jayne Martin. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “Daddy Chronicles” and your postal address in the body of the email.
We also have a copy of From Your Hostess At The T&A Museum by Kathleen Balma. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “T&A Museum” and your postal address in the body of the email.
Finally, we have a copy of songs we used to dance to by Courtney Marie. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “songs we used to dance to” and your postal address in the body of the email.
Good luck, everyone!
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COMING SOON
We will shortly be featuring a review of Letters from the Periphery by Alex Skovron, With (diary / antipoetry) by Kenning JP Garcia, Something So Precious by James Lee, an interview with Surviving Home’s Katerina Canyon, and lots more reviews and interviews.
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Drop by The Compulsive Reader talks (see the widget on right-hand side of the site) to listen to our latest episode which features my interview with Jessica Au reading from and talking about her new book Cold Enough for Snow. Or drop by to listen directly here: https://anchor.fm/compulsivereader/episodes/Jessica-Au-on-Cold-Enough-For-Snow-e1epc31
You can also subscribe to the show via iTunes and get updates automatically, straight to your favourite listening device. Find us under podcasts by searching for Compulsive Reader Talks. Then just click subscribe.
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(c) 2022 Magdalena Ball. Nothing in this newsletter may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher, however, reprint rights are readily available. Please feel free to forward this newsletter in its entirety.
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