Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 25, Issue 1, 1 Jan 2023

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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. Happy new year! Hope you all got something of a break or are having one now. People often ask how long Compulsive Reader has been going for. We are now in our 25th year! In Internet terms that is a very long time. Some of you have been subscribers since my first week. Some of you are new here. Everyone is welcome – this is an inclusive, open, community of readers and I’m very glad that you’re here with us now. I have some news to begin our newsletter – I’ve got a new book out. It’s called Bobish and is a verse memoir of my great-grandmother Rebecca Lieberman, who migrated from the Shtetls of Eastern Europe to the US in 1907. Bobish was published this month by Puncher & Wattmann, and I’d love for you to order a copy – either from your favourite book seller or library (if they don’t have it please ask – ISBN: 9781925571601) and if you do so please let me know and I’ll happily send you a beautiful custom autographed bookplate. You can find out more at https://magdalenaball.com/?page_id=932 Thank you!

Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

A review of Voices of Freedom: Contemporary Writing from Ukraine edited by Kateryna Kazimirova and Daryna Anastasieva

The collection, which is beautifully curated, includes twenty seven living authors from the Ukrainian community, whose work explores a wide range of topics from the many invasions of the country, from the War in Donbas in 2014 which led to the annexing of Crimea through to the major escalation in February 2022, but also poems, essays and stories about the desire to maintain a cultural identity, oppression, love, the climate, forest, feminism, friendship, and pleasure. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/29/a-review-of-voices-of-freedom-contemporary-writing-from-ukraine-edited-by-kateryna-kazimirova-and-daryna-anastasieva/

A reviews of Settler by Maggie Queeney

If I imagine these poems written on canvas, I think of them as “blood-anointed.” Queeney bears witness and makes frank the realities of these women, or the female experience that may read removed but isn’t always entirely separate from us today. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/26/a-reviews-of-settler-by-maggie-queeney/

A review of Almost Deadly, Almost Good by Alice Kaltman

Almost Deadly, Almost Good is a complex web of sins and virtues that presents a wider, more multidimensional world. The stories are fantastic melodrama and human emotion and demonstrate the nature of humanity in more than black and white terms.

A review of Natural Philosophies by Michael Leach

Leach is a scientist and this shows in his preoccupations, with the natural world and our place within it as actors, colonisers, in sickness and caregiving. The focus moves from heavenly bodies to human ones, from the earth to the mind, all with a precision that reflects Leach’s methodical process. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/23/a-review-of-natural-philosophies-by-michael-leach/

A review of Ask No Questions By Eva Collins

There is a tension between old and new that remains a keynote throughout the book. Learning to accept the duality of her nationality, Eva reclaims her old self and her old name and transforms it into a unique hybrid. Ask No Questions is a book that explores serious topics. The trauma and sadness of the refugee experience is rarely covered through the viewpoint of a child, and Eva teases out that perspective with poetic delicacy, tracing the way in which this perception changes through time. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/17/a-review-of-ask-no-questions-by-eva-collins/

A review of Book of Knives by Lise Haines

You might be excused for thinking this particular carton of tropes has languished in the back of the Frigidaire long past its freshness date. You might be excused, that is, if you haven’t read Lise Haines’ deliciously creepy Book of Knives. To enter this modern gothic is to enter a realm of deep and unmooring uncertainty, where the living may prey on the living and the dead — just possibly — might help or harm.

A review of The Music of Eternity by Ketaki Datta

The overarching theme of time, timelessness, the connection between the past, present, and future binds the poems, even as the poet covers a range of ideas and emotions, displaying a unique vision. Datta ponders over the human condition, drawing on everyday happenings to soar into philosophical and sometimes mystical musings. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/10/a-review-of-the-music-of-eternity-by-ketaki-datta/

An interview with Tom Maremaa

Tom Maremaa talks about his new book Chrome and Punishment, a new mash-up of a Dostoevsky classic, including how the book came about, what makes this mash-up different from the original, St Petersburg, Raskolnikov and how he fares in this new version, his new characters, a hint at the ending(s) and more.

A review of Chimera by Brad Buchanan

Chimera takes us through an account of multiple procedures and setbacks, presented alternately as invasions, imprisonments, and more bluntly, as betrayal by bodily function. His tone is uncomfortably straightforward, as though he is candidly refusing the reader’s sympathy even as he lays out the visceral details: Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/06/a-review-of-chimera-by-brad-buchanan/

A review of Anamnesis By Denise O’Hagan

Anamnesis opens a door into what it means to be human. O’Hagan ponders subjects of perennial relevance in fresh literary ways, always with a convincing naturalness, whether the language is sophisticated or everyday. Even a box of useless items takes on a profound poetic rhythm in O’Hagan’s skilful hands. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/04/a-review-of-anamnesis-by-denise-ohagan/

A review of Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland by Katy Didden

Didden’s poetry is thick, like the hot, oozing lava that permeates the land – the “postvolcanic landscape.” We are further drawn in by the history, the tributaries of ancient Icelandic poetry, “its craters of dove-gray ashes matted with snow, / attracts artists who siege eddas in the rills.” These powerful lines draw out the significance of Icelandic poetry in our time. Read more: http://compulsivereader.com/2022/12/03/a-review-of-ore-choir-the-lava-on-iceland-by-katy-didden/

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 categorised archives (currently at 3,043) 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, Tiya Miles has won the 2022 Cundill History Prize for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House), which the jurors called a ‘superbly written’ story of an enslaved mother and her daughter. The novel traces the lives of three generations of Black women through one object: a cotton sack. Miles, the director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, was awarded the $75,000 prize, which is administered by McGill University, at the prize’s first in-person gala since 2019, held at the Windsor Ballrooms in Montreal.

The Forward Arts Foundation announced that Kim Moore’s All the Men I Never Married won the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, while Stephanie Sy-Quia’s Amnion took the £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for debut collection and Nick Laird’s “Up Late” topped the £1,000 best single poem category.

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters by Henry Gee (published here by St. Martin’s Press) won the £25,000 Royal Society Science Book Prize, which recognises works that “exemplify the extraordinary variety of topics and narrative style within the genre, and the role that great writing plays in bringing outstanding research and ideas to a wide audience.

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel has been chosen as Waterstones Book of the Year 2022. Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry, was named Waterstones Author of the Year; and A.F. Steadman’s Skandar and the Unicorn Thief was chosen Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga (Graywolf Press) has won the $15,000 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Organisers said, “If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English takes place in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when an Egyptian-American daughter of immigrants, nostalgic for the country she’s never lived in, falls in love with a man she meets in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but is now addicted to cocaine and living in a shack. When their relationship takes a violent turn, the fallout exposes the gaps in American identity politics and reexamines the faces of empire.”

Sally Hayden won the 2022 An Post Irish Book of the Year for My Fourth Time, We Drowned. Her book, which had previously been named Odger’s Berndtson Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the recent An Post Irish Book Awards, was among six category winners competing for the overall prize. The book was published in the U.S. by Melville House.

The winners of the 2022 Australian Prime Minister Literary Awards have been announced as ‘Red Heaven’ by Nicolas Rothwell – Fiction, ‘Human Looking’ by Andy Jackson – Poetry, ’Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan’ by Mark Willacy – Non-fiction, ’Semut: The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo’ by Christine Helliwell – Australian history, ‘Mina and the Whole Wide World’ by Sherryl Clark, illustrated by Briony Stewart – Children’s literature, and ’The Gaps’ by Leanne Hall – Young adult literature. Hosted at Design Tasmania Launceston, the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards honoured the best of Australian literature.

RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul’s Drag Race, edited by Lindsay Bryde & Tommy Mayberry, won the 2022 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, claiming 39% of the popular vote and “putting a clean pair of stilettos between it and the second-place finisher, What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada,” the Bookseller reported. While the final margin of victory was 14%, the two titles “were neck-and-neck for most of the Diagram election cycle until a late surge saw the former title pull ahead, perhaps mirroring Danny Beard’s shock win over Cheddar Gorgeous in the recently concluded fourth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.” The Diagram was originally conceived in 1978 by Trevor Bounford and Bruce Robertson, co-founders of publishing solutions firm the Diagram Group, to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There is no prize for the winning author or publisher, but traditionally a “passable bottle of claret” is given to the nominator of the winning entry.

The winners of the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards for Nonfiction are: £10,000 to Nuzha Nuseibeh for Namesake. £5,000 to Ellen Atlanta for Pixel Flesh: Modern Beauty Culture and the Women It Harms, and £2,500 to Malachi McIntosh for A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement.

Finally, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been the Brooklyn Public Library’s most borrowed book throughout its 125-year history. I have a little piece on Sendak coming out this month – watch this space.

Have a great month!

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Jean Feingold who won a copy of Jane’s Jam by Jane Enright. Congratulations also to Annette Estell, who won a copy of Dissection by Dr Cristina LePort.

Our new site giveaway is for a copy of Dead Heat to Destiny by J B Rivard. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “Dead Heat to Destiny” and your postal address in the body of the email.

We also have an exclusive numbered e-book autographed via Apple Pencil of The Alphabet According to Several Strange Creatures by Simon Nader. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “The Alphabet According to Several Strange Creatures”.

Good luck!

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