Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 25, Issue 4, 1 April 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. Here is the batch of reviews and interviews:

Bulging Blooms, a review of Telling You Everything by Cindy Hochman

To read Telling You Everything is to come away refreshed and revitalized from Hochman’s, original way of looking at the world and seeking her place in it. This is what poetry is, this is what it can be. It comes out of a life fully lived. In Brooklyn. Where Hochman continuously learns something new from an old situation. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/29/bulging-blooms-a-review-of-telling-you-everything-by-cindy-hochman/

A review of Waiting for Jonathan Koshy by Murzban Shroff

Jonathan Koshy is perpetually the outsider in this story of four friends who are awaiting Koshy’s return at the comfortable residence of Bollywood child Anwar Khan, whose home becomes a focal point for the four friends: Prashant, Dhruv, the narrator, and Jonathan. They come together there on the regular, aging disgracefully and gathering to reminisce over drinks and the odd joint, laughing, supporting one another, and allowing their voices to weave in and out like different parts of the same organism as they recall their youth. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/28/a-review-of-waiting-for-jonathan-koshy-by-murzban-shroff/

Of Beauty and Terror in Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night by Margo Berdeshevsky

Here is a series of poems, stories, photographs, epigraphs that come together to create a world governed by a powerful and bold conjurer of images and tales that mirror the devastation and beauty and vastness of a journey in a world we will recognize as our own. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/20/of-beauty-and-terror-in-berdeshevskys-kneel-said-the-night-by-margo-berdeshevsky/

A review of Zen and the Art of Astroturf by Bronwyn Anne Rodden

In some of her poems Rodden asks questions that are profound and poignant. These are mainly questions about the absurdity sprouting in our world. I asked the poet if there was a thread in her poetry or a commonality and she answered: “Absurdism is something I think is relevant to people today, where we have been dealing with an international pandemic and environmental catastrophes, and people can relate more to the absurd than at many other times in history.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/17/a-review-of-zen-and-the-art-of-astroturf-by-bronwyn-anne-rodden/

A review of Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho trans. by Dan Beachy Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick translates as if he is beside Sappho on her footpath to something quite never before seen and heard. A grove of oaks shake with mountain winds in the book title fragment from a pastoral world of alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme. Our collective species memory enlivens, quakes to a time when we were one with the natural world, calling out holophrases to goats and dogs, other herders, and goddesses and gods. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/16/a-review-of-wind-mountain-oak-the-poems-of-sappho-trans-by-dan-beachy-quick/

A Review of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place by Kelly Weber

My copy of this book is filled with quickly scratched notes, annotation symbols only I understand, question marks, small open hearts, underlined sentences, circled words, messy smudges, angry creases. I struggled. I read and re-read. I wondered. I questioned. I chased. I stretched. At times I thought I might break, as well. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/14/a-review-of-we-are-changed-to-deer-at-the-broken-place-by-kelly-weber/

A review of Frank Dark by Stephen Massimilla

The book is replete with experiences of mental and physical crises, death and ghosts. Many themes resonate with the cover exploring sight/vision, the eye, the sea, the shore, and harbors. Imagery of light/lightning, the moon, lamps, clock, and swans recur throughout the book. The poems also display a sort of PTSD in the aftermath of near death experiences that he explores and shares with the reader. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/13/a-review-of-frank-dark-by-stephen-massimilla/

A review of Dark Mode by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Though this is Blunt’s first full-length thriller, it’s expertly crafted with all the right hooks and twists to keep you engaged and wanting to know what happens until the very end. The fast pace and the intensity of the situation that protagonist Reagan Carson finds herself in from page one doesn’t diminish or undermine the deep exploration of misogyny – both at an individual level and a structural one – that underpins the book, or the way it conveys a growing anxiety that is driven by more than the plot. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/12/a-review-of-dark-mode-by-ashley-kalagian-blunt/

A review of The Architecture of Dust by Chike Nzerue

Nzerue’s medical background brings a deep understanding of the topics addressed in this volume, creating imagery that transform the meticulous renderings of the medical field into an arena of understandable rhetoric. There are so many well crafted lines that it is difficult to pull the best to critique. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/11/a-review-of-the-architecture-of-dust-by-chike-nzerue/

Using Form to Manipulate Time in Max Porter’s Lanny

It is not just the style and formatting that is soaked with the understanding of time, but the prose itself which is permeated with the musings and misgivings about the passing of time, and the understanding of times influence on the world that surrounds. The first section of the book is half of the text, and through it the reader comes to understand that Lanny, like Dead Papa Toothwort, is so in tune with the earth that he doesn’t follow the rationality of humans, of the mundane. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/08/using-form-to-manipulate-time-in-max-porters-lanny/

A review of A Striking Woman by Ruth Latta

A Striking Woman is a powerful look at a challenging era in world history. The author expertly and accurately paints a true picture of society in early twentieth-century Quebec, setting the stage for the confrontations that developed later in the life of one very determined woman. Her knowledge of contemporary history is evident. The title is catchy and certainly provides the reader with multiple metaphoric connections to the word, ‘striking’. Ruth has a vivid approach to portraying Canadian women throughout history. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/07/a-review-of-a-striking-woman-by-ruth-latta/

A review of The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza

Throughout the text Garza challenges the readers memory of what came before in the text using the window, but also through the pervasive repeated “I remember(s)” that occur throughout the text. Each time a thing is remembered it is changed, slightly altered. Which begs the question, how is what we have read previously in the text altered through both the frame of our own remembrance of it and the continual recollections of the narrator? Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/06/a-review-of-the-taiga-syndrome-by-cristina-rivera-garza/

A review of The Beckoning World by Douglas Bauer

Lou Gehrig, as wrought by Bauer’s pen, appears as he was in life — a pensive, quiet soul, dogged by insecurities and excessively devoted to his mother. Ruth, in the pages of The Beckoning World, is supremely confident, self-absorbed, voluptuary — a boy raised in an orphanage to be deified by a nation. As the Yankee sluggers barnstorm their way through the small-town west, Earl will experience an encounter that provides shape to his own life’s story. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/05/a-review-of-the-beckoning-world-by-douglas-bauer/

A review of Lessons by Ian McEwan

The story begins in medias res, with Roland Baines, in his home in Clapham, waking from a nightmare about his boyhood piano lessons, and realizing that he is now a grown man taking care of his infant son, Lawrence. Roland is “the baby’s bed and his god.” Alissa, Roland’s wife, has vanished, leaving a note telling him not to find her. “I have been living the wrong life. Please try to forgive me,” she wrote. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/04/a-review-of-lessons-by-ian-mcewan/

An interview with Black Foam’s Haji Jaber

The author of Black Foam talks about his new book, why he wrote it, his research, the relationship between his work as a journalist and his work as a writer, his audience, his favourite books, Dar al-Tanweer, why he teaches, and more. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/03/01/24672/

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 3,115) 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, the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlists have been announced. Thirty-five judges considered 850+ original works across 11 categories. A total of $350,000 in prize money will be awarded when the winners are announced at the State Library on Monday 22 May, making these the richest state-funded literary awards in the country. The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) includes Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au (Giramondo Publishing), Every Version of You by Grace Chan (Affirm Press), Women I Know by Katerina Gibson (Scribner an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia), Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor (Pan Macmillan Australia), and Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston (Wakefield Press). The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) includes Revenants by Adam Aitken (Giramondo Publishing), The Singer and Other Poems by Kim Cheng Boey (Cordite Books), Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown (Hunter Publishers Australia, Mirabilia by Lisa Gorton (Giramondo Publishing), The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt (UQP), and And to Ecstasy by Marjon Mossammaparast (Upswell Publishing). For the full list of titles, to vote in the people’s choice awards, and/or to get a free ticket to prize ceremony visit: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/awards/nsw-premiers-literary-awards

The shortlist has been released for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Each of the six shortlisted authors will receive $10,000, and the winner, who be announced on May 21, gets an additional $50,000. The shortlisted titles are: The Highest Part of the Horizon by Fatima Abdulhamid (Saudi Arabia), Drought by Al-Sadiq Haj Ahmed (Algeria), The Exile of the Water Diviner by Zahran Alqasmi (Oman), Concerto Qurina Eduardo by Najwa Binshatwan (Libya), The Stone of Happiness by Azher Jirjees (Iraq), Days of the Shining Sun by Miral al-Tahawy (Egypt). Chair of judges Mohammed Achaari commented: “The scope of the 2023 shortlisted novels is vibrant and varied…. The judges feel that through this multiplicity of voices and idiom, with contrasting styles, structure and narrative forms, the broad sweep which these stories comprise offers a dynamic snapshot of the contemporary Arabic novel.”

Foreword Reviews is celebrating its 25th-year anniversary of exclusively reviewing independently published books. Foreword was one of the first publications to recognise that indie publishing was about to boom, and they launched in 1998 in order to provide high quality reviews of indie books and promote more diversity in publishing–and they have been innovating in the indie publishing space ever since. In addition to publishing a bimonthly print magazine, online reviews and author interviews, Foreword hosts the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, annually recognising the best independent presses and authors. You can watch an interview with founder Victoria Sutherland about Forward’s process over 25 years here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg8usgiqTHA

Now in its twenty-eighth year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 longlist of 16 novels has been announced as Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris, Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova, Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Homesick by Jennifer Croft, I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow, Pod by Laline Paull, Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie, The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin. For the full announcement recording visit: https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/announcing-the-2023-womens-prize-longlist

Percival Everett’s Dr. No (Graywolf Press) was honored with the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award at the PEN America Literary Awards ceremony, held Thursday in New York City. Other award winners named at the event included: PEN Open Book Award ($10,000): The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter (Random House), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000): Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Books), PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel ($10,000): Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah (Algonquin Books), PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($15,000): A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection ($5,000): To the Realization of, Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf), PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): The Loose Pearl by Paula Ilabaca Nuñez, translated from Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky (co-im-press), PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao (Penguin Classics). Honoured with career achievement awards were comedy legend Tina Fey (PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award); titan of Hindi literature Vinod Kumar Shukla (PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature); and playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza (PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award).

The New Literary Project released a shortlist of five finalists for the $50,000 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, which is presented “to a mid-career author of fiction who has earned an extraordinarily distinguished reputation and garnered the widespread appreciation of readers.” The winner, to be named in April, will be in brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area in October. The finalists and their most recent publications are: Rabih Alameddine, The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Atlantic), Clare Beams, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday), James Hannaham, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (Little, Brown), David Means, Two Nurses, Smoking (FSG), Manuel Muñoz, The Consequences (Graywolf).

The shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award has been announced. The winner, who will receive £25,000, will be announced April 27. The shortlisted titles and the year they won the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, are: One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (2020), Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (2012), Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (2010), Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021), Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan (2002), and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro (2006).

Simon Parkin won the £4,000 Wingate Literary Prize, which honours “the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader,” for The Island of Extraordinary Captives. Aviva Dautch, chair of the judges, said: “All seven of the shortlisted books were exceptionally strong. The range of subjects and genres made choosing the winner very difficult, but we judges felt that The Island of Extraordinary Captives particularly fitted the criteria of the Wingate Prize to communicate lived Jewish experience to the general reader.

Thirteen years after Jasper Jones was awarded Book Of The Year (in 2009), Australian independent booksellers have announced RUNT by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin) as their favourite book from last year, and the winner of The Indie Book Awards 2023 Book of the Year. This is Craig’s second Indie BOTY win, and is only the second Children’s book to win the Indie BOTY in the history of the awards (and that was five awards ago with Nevermoor). Craig’s third novel, Honeybee, won Best Fiction for the Indie Book Awards 2021. Other winners include, for fiction, Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Hachette Australia), for nonfiction, The Book Of Roads And Kingdoms by Richard Fidler (ABC Books, HarperCollins Australia), for debut fiction, All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien (HQ Fiction, HarperCollins), for illustrated non-fiction, First Nations Food Companion by Damien Coulthard and Rebecca Sullivan (Murdoch Books), and for young adult, The Brink by Holden Sheppard (Text Publishing).

Shortlists in the six categories of the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards have been selected and can be seen here: https://www.zayedaward.ae/en/media.center/news.aspx Winners will be announced in April and be honored at an awards ceremony at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in May. Each winner will receive 750,000 UAE dirhams.

Kitty Kelley has won the 2023 BIO Award, given by the Biographers International Organization to “a distinguished colleague who has made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography.” BIO said in part, “Widely regarded as the foremost expert and author of unauthorised biography, Kelley has displayed courage and deftness in writing unvarnished accounts of some of the most powerful figures in politics, media, and popular culture.”

A longlist has been released for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. Judges Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Gregory Scofield (Canada) and Natasha Trethewey (U.S.) each read 602 books of poetry, including 54 translations from 20 languages, submitted by 229 publishers from 20 countries. The longest includes Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II, Manolis Aligizakis, Canada, translated from the Greek written by Tasos Livaditis, Greece, Libros Libertad, The Study of Human Life by Joshua Bennett, USA, Penguin Books, The Threshold by Robyn Creswell, USA, translated from the Arabic written by Iman Mersal, Egypt/Canada, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt, Australia, University of Queensland Press, The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, USA, Corsair Poetry, Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave, Canada, McClelland & Stewart, Balladz by Sharon Olds, USA, Alfred A. Knop, Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves, USA, W. W. Norton, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire, Somali/UK, Penguin Canada, and Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, Vietnam/USA, Cape Poetry, and Penguin Press. The five shortlisted books will be announced on Wednesday, April 19, 2023. The winner will be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings to be held at Koerner Hall on Wednesday, June 7, and will be awarded C$130,000. The other shortlisted finalists will each receive C$10,000.

Nadia Mikail’s The Cats We Meet Along the Way won the overall 2023 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, as well as the older readers category. The Bookseller reported that the award, voted for solely by booksellers, consists of £5,000 and “the promise of ongoing commitment to the winners’ writing and illustrating careers.” Other category winners were M.T. Khan’s Nura and the Immortal Palace (younger readers) and Kim Hillyard’s Gretel the Wonder Mammoth (illustrated books).

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage (Viking) has won the $50,000 New-York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, which recognizes “the best book of the year in the field of American history or biography.”

Finalists have been selected for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, recognising “non-fiction books penned by working journalists that bring attention and transparency to current events or societal issues of global or national significance.” The winner, who receives $15,000, will be announced in May. The finalists:
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher (Little, Brown)m My Fourth Time We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden (Melville House), The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City by Nicholas Dawidoff (Norton). The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence (St. Martin’s Press), and Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday).

Finally, The shortlist for the $60,000 Stella Prize for women and non-binary writers has been announced. The shortlisted books are: We Come With This Place (Debra Dank, Echo), big beautiful female theory (Eloise Grills, Affirm), The Jaguar (Sarah Holland-Batt, UQP), Hydra (Adriane Howell, Transit Lounge), Indelible City (Louisa Lim, Text), and Bad Art Mother (Edwina Preston, Wakefield). This year’s shortlist comprises one graphic memoir (big beautiful female theory), one poetry collection (The Jaguar), one novel (Hydra) and three works of nonfiction. Every shortlisted book is published by an independent publisher. The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 12 titles. The winner will be announced on 27 April at a ceremony in Sydney.

Have a great month!

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Christina-Marie Sears who won a copy of Black Foam by Haji Jabi.

Congratulations to Noel Jeffs who won an autographed copy of The Golden Bridge by Jennifer Maiden.

Congratulations to Diane Dubay who won a copy of The Beautiful Misfits by Susan Reinhardt.

Our new site giveaway is for a copy of The Year of Jubilee by Cindy Morgan. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “The Year of Jubilee” and your postal address in the body of the email.

We also have a copy of The File by Gary Born. To win send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line: “The File” and your postal address in the body of the email.

Good luck!

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