Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://compulsivereader.com
Volume 24, Issue 6, 1 June 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 Little Bird by Wendy James

The stories told through these columns crosses over the other two stories until the three stories line up, weaving together like a helix, linking Jo with her mother in a way that is slightly mystical. Jo’s own reintegration into Arthurville is managed with just the right blend of nostalgia and irony, Jo’s intelligence providing a lens that is both loving and critical, allowing the town’s homey beauty and its decline to come through her perception. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/28/a-review-of-a-little-bird-by-wendy-james/

A review of M by Dale Kushner

Every poem is a journey, every journey a poem. M by Dale Kushner is a stunning collection of poems depicting life’s journey in three stages. The roads of sorrow and suffering, the paths of transformation toward spiritual joy and desire, and the longing to know and feel all that is holy are contained in Kushner’s work. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/25/a-review-of-m-by-dale-kushner/

A review of City Scattered by Tyler Mills

Tyler Mills’ new poetry chapbook City Scattered is in four voices, like a poetic radio play set in Berlin in 1930 when radio was booming. Mills weaves four voices/characters in an emulation of an old-style radio drama that invites the reader to explore the lives of women at this time in the context of a society dangling on the edge of totalitarianism and a world on fire. Each of the four steady voices throughout the book have poems that enrich the story we are invited into. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/22/a-review-of-city-scattered-by-tyler-mills/

A review of Acanthus by Claire Potter

Claire Potter’s Acanthus both draws on mythology and subsumes the intimate and personal into its broader terrain. Potter’s work is consistently compelling, utilising the reservoir of cultural knowledge abundant in mythological stories and heroes. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/19/a-review-of-acanthus-by-claire-potter/

A review of Angle of Flickering Light by Gina Troisi

Angle of Flickering Light tells an honest story. It’s the story of a life in progress, marked at its beginning by a series of small, devastating acts—a parent who should protect and cherish instead abuses. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/16/a-review-of-angle-of-flickering-light-by-gina-troisi/

A review of One April After the War by C S Boarman

Throughout the novel, the author’s exhaustive knowledge of the era’s politics, technology, social mores, and the geography of Kentucky and Ohio, come into play, with the result that the reader is totally immersed in the historic setting. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/12/a-review-of-one-april-after-the-war-by-c-s-boarman/

A review of Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill

Daisy & Woolf is a rich, complex book that blurs binaries and boundaries, provoking big questions around art, parenting, love, privilege, colonisation, and creativity.The narrative flows quickly, driven by its dual protagonists, with the book unfolding its denser meaning later, in the shared collaborative space between reader and writer. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/08/a-review-of-daisy-woolf-by-michelle-cahill/

An interview with Brian Lebeau author of A Disturbing Nature

The author of A Disturbing Nature talks about his new book, his motivation for writing, the book’s inspiration, on writing about heavy subjects, key themes and narratives, his next book, and lots more. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/05/an-interview-with-brian-lebeau-author-of-a-disturbing-nature/

A review of Friday Book by John Barth

Essays can often have a certain unapproachable quality. However, when you read Barth, you can’t expect a constant stream of seriousness, or at least seriousness in the most acceptable times. Even before the barrage of essays comes forth to dazzle us, under the heading “The Title of This Book,” he already starts with some unserious seriousness when reflecting on the various sorts of titles floating around in the literary world—while refraining from actually speaking of his title much at all. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/04/a-review-of-friday-book-by-john-barth/

On the Spirituality of Keisha-Gaye Anderson’s A Spell For Living

Spirituality is at the core of Anderson’s work. In it, she talks about God, the self, and the universe in one breath. These, and more, are attributes that shine light on spirituality but do not define it in totality. Anderson’s poetry leads to this point, that of knowing yet not knowing while searching for meaning. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/03/on-the-spirituality-of-keisha-gaye-andersons-a-spell-for-living/

An interview with Pillar of Salt’s Anna Salton Eisen

Anna Salton Eisen’s memoir Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, has never been more relevant than it is today. As we witness Ukrainians under attack and escaping across the Polish border, Anna’s new book draws upon her parents’ Holocaust history to bring perspective on the current war. In this Q&A, Anna talks about her new book, her parents and why they didn’t talk about the Holocaust when she was growing up, her trip to Poland with her parents, her new project, and lots more. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/05/01/an-interview-with-pillar-of-salts-anna-salton-eisen/

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 2,959 which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

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LITERARY NEWS

In the literary news this month, Sonia Sanchez is the recipient of the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded annually by Poets & Writers to recognise an American poet of exceptional talent. Endowed by John and Susan Jackson, this year’s prize carries an award of $80,000. Sanchez is the author of more than 20 books and is a poet, professor, and international lecturer on Black culture and literature, women’s liberation, peace, and racial justice.

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi (published in the U.S. by Norton) has won the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize, sponsored by the Royal Society of Literature and honouring “a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place.”

The Writers’ Trust of Canada has named six finalists for the 2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Awards for Emerging Writers, which is presented to a Canadian citizen or permanent resident who has been published in an independently edited literary magazine or anthology, but is unpublished in book form and without a book contract. Winners in two categories, poetry and short fiction, will each receive C$10,000 at an in-person event on June 2. Finalists get C$2,500 (about US$1,955) and a mentorship opportunity with an established editor. The annual awards are open to Canadian writers who are unpublished in book form. This year’s finalists can be found here: https://www.writerstrust.com/awards/rbc-bronwen-wallace-award-for-emerging-writers/

The Royal Society of Literature has released a shortlist for the 2022 Encore Award, celebrating outstanding achievements in second novels. The winner, who will be named May 24, receives £10,000 with each of the other four shortlisted authors getting £500. This year’s shortlisted titles are: The High House by Jessie Greengrass, Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall, The Giant Dark by Sarvat Hasin, Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford, and Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic.

The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded. The winner for fiction was The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books). For poetry, the winner was frank: sonnets, by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press). The full list can be found here: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2022

Winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, have been announced. Each winner receives AED 750,000 and the winning and shortlisted titles in the children;s literature and literature categories are also be eligible for translation funding. The winners include, for Literature: Emirati Maisoon Saqer for Maq’ha Reesh, Ain Ala Massr (Eye on Egypt: Café Riche) (Nahdet Misr Publishing). For Arabic Culture in Other Languages: Iraqi-American Dr. Muhsin J. Al-Musawi for The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry (Cambridge University Press). For the full list visit: https://www.zayedaward.ae/en/default.aspx

Celeste Mohammed won the $10,000 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, honoring the “best book by a Caribbean writer published last year,” for her debut novel in stories Pleasantview, which also won the fiction category. The other two category winners, Thinking with Trees by Jason Allen-Paisant (poetry) and Things I Have Withheld by Kei Mill (nonfiction), each receive $3,000.

The Publishing Triangle has announced the winners of the 2022 Triangle Awards, honouring the best LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction, poetry and trans literature published in 2021. This year’s winners are: The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, presented with the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards: Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco), The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction: The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. (Putnam)., and The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry: Punks: New and Selected Poems by John Keene (The Song Cave).. For the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry: Mama Phife Represents by Cheryl Boyce Taylor (Haymarket Books)., The Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature: A Symmetry by Ari Banias (Norton), The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction: Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones (The New Press)., and The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction: Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome (Mariner).

Patricia Lockwood has won the £20,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut novel No One Is Talking About This, published in the U.S. by Riverhead Books. Founded in 2006, the Dylan Thomas Prize is awarded annually for the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 years or younger, in the form of poetry, novels, short stories or drama.

Yiyun Li won the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, which recognizes writers “who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form.” She will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on December 2.

For his translation of The Strudlhof Steps by Heimito von Doderer (New York Review Books), Vincent Kling has won the $10,000 2022 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut New York and honoring “an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the U.S. or Canada.”

The winners of the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have been announced. A total of $295,000 in prize money was awarded, making these the richest state-funded literary awards in the country. Thirty judges considered a record of 746 entries across all the categories and the winner for Book of the Year ($10,000) & Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000) was: Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System by Safdar Ahmed (Twelve Panels Press). The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) went to Dark as Last Night by Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press). The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000) went to The Winter Road: A story of legacy, land and a killing at Croppa Creek by Kate Holden (Black Inc. Books), and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) went to accelerations & inertias by Dan Disney (Vagabond Press). For the full list and judges comments visit: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/awards/nsw-premiers-literary-awards

Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table by Mohamed Alnaas (Rashm) has won the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Alnaas receives $50,000, and funding will be provided for an English translation of the debut novel.At 31, Alnaas is the youngest writer to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and the first Libyan. His short story collection, Blue Blood, was published in 2020. Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table is his first novel, which he wrote in just six months during lockdown and while Tripoli was under bombardment. He says writing the book was his “refuge from insanity” amid Covid and war.

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the 2022 International Booker Prize, which “aims to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world” and to celebrate the work of translators. The £50,000 award is split between author and translator. Tomb of Sand is the first book originally written in any Indian language to win the International Booker Prize, and the first novel translated from Hindi to be recognised by the award.

Finally, The Women’s Prize Trust has released the 2022 Discoveries shortlist, which “aims to find aspiring female writing talent from across the U.K. and Ireland.” The prize is run in partnership with Curtis Brown literary agency, the Curtis Brown Creative writing school (both part of the Curtis Brown Group) and Audible. This year’s Discoveries finalists are Sui Annukka for Thursday, Sadbh Kellett for Hunt the Hare, Nikki Logan for The Last Card in the Suit, Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin for The Next Life, Katy Oglethorpe for Stitches and Ruth Rosengarten for Over.

Have a great month!

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Vicki Wurgler, who won a copy of Gods of Deception by David Adams Cleveland.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Malis, who won a copy of Suburban Death Project by Aimee Parkison.

Our new site giveaway is for a copy of Sunday Afternoons and Other Times Remembered by Ben Ewell. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “Sunday Afternoons” and your postal address in the body of the email.

We also have a copy of Finding Grace by Maren Cooper to giveaway. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “Finding Grace” and your postal address in the body of the email.

Good luck, everyone!

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