Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 29, Issue 6, 1 June 2026

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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. We are now on Substack! At this stage I’m just doing my monthly newsletter promo, but as time goes on, I may well open conversations about all things books there, so please do join us there: Compulsive Reader Substack. Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

A review of Tough Poets Review 02 edited by Kathleen Cullen & Rick Schober

This spirited new journal lives up to its name: solid, uncompromising and shot through with a vigorous lyricism. Tough Poets Review is an adventurous blend of diverse voices and artistic styles, a rich feast for the eye and mind. Literary journals as lively and interesting as this are rarely come by. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/29/a-review-of-tough-poets-review-02-edited-by-kathleen-cullen-rick-schober/

A review of Farhang Book Two by Patrick Woodcock

What makes Farhang Book Two such a powerful achievement is the way it unites global experience with the emotional terrain of Nunavut and the Arctic. Every remembered country and conflict passes through the stillness and isolation of the North before reaching the page. The result is a collection where geography becomes inseparable from psychology, and where memory itself behaves like tidewater beneath ice: shifting, returning, impossible to contain. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/28/a-review-of-farhang-book-two-by-patrick-woodcock/

A review of Misery and Other Choices directed by Samuel Lucas Allen

Samuel Lucas Allen has just released another short film and as with his previous film, Cut, Misery and Other Choices, is a powerful and slightly disturbing reflection on eco-anxiety, grief and the difficult trade-off between hate and hope. Though the film is only ten minutes long the questions it raises about culpability, ethics and sustainability leave a lasting impression. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/26/a-review-of-misery-and-other-choices-directed-by-samuel-lucas-allen/

A review of Once We Were Wildlife by Inga Simpson

Once We Were Wildlife is a collection that explores the human/natural world connection, moving beyond the standard character arc into metamorphosis. The characters are not so much in nature as they are discovering their essential selves as nature. Simpson handles the transformation subtly but the writing is so resonant that the reader cannot help but rethink their own sense of self. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/25/a-review-of-once-we-were-wildlife-by-inga-simpson/

Thin Reed Throat by Damien Becker

Suffice to say, Damien does not shy away from difficult topics. But what I appreciated was that he doesn’t get cloying or guilt-trippy about the relentlessness of living with a chronic condition, the suffering, the endurance, or the witnessing of his friends suffering too. He lets the imagery do the heavy lifting. And it’s the very simplicity of statement, the lack of adornment in the stark truth, that hits even harder. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/25/thin-reed-throat-by-damien-becker/

A review of The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

Elkin’s translation reads exceptionally well as English prose. It conveys the frazzled state of Beauvoir’s hero, a young wife and mother, barely in her thirties, as well as Beauvoir’s attitude toward narrative literature, opposed to the experimental forms of the 50s and 60s, and in favor of fiction that was socially motivated, shamelessly didactic, and set clarity of social vision as its practical task. But that does not entail a retread of mimetic naturalism. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/23/a-review-of-the-image-of-her-by-simone-de-beauvoir/

A review of The Fifth Year by Marlen Haushofer

The Fifth Year is brilliant in its descriptions, alive and pulsing with energy. It’s not precious, precocious, or irritatingly coy. Haushofer captures “the shimmering of the sun” and the darkness that falls beyond the beams, the comfort and strength of love, and the peculiarities of character, including that of Marili, in a world where “The birds seemed to have dozed off in the yellow trees, and sometimes a leaf dropped silently and landed on the water.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/19/a-review-of-the-fifth-year-by-marlen-haushofer/

Intimacy, Perception and the Body: On Lauren Camp’s Took House

Many of Camp’s poems resist conventional punctuation, allowing sentences to extend across lines in a continuous flow. This produces a reading experience that is both immersive and destabilizing: one is carried forward without pause, yet never fully grounded. The effect recalls what White describes as poetry that is not merely like interior life but is interior life—language as the direct articulation of thought and sensation before they cohere into narrative. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/18/intimacy-perception-and-the-body-on-lauren-camps-took-house/

A review of Alight on all things precious by Sarah Rice

The way Rice combines the images with the poetry creates a two-way ekphrastic, where language not only takes its cue from the images but also creates resonances that change the way the image is viewed, adding in sonic elements, breath, and exploring light in different ways. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/17/a-review-of-alight-on-all-things-precious-by-sarah-rice/

A Review of Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond

Composed of sequences of near-sonnets—thirteen-line forms that gesture toward closure but refuse to resolve—the book unfolds as an extended dialogue, each poem answering, refracting, or unsettling the one beside it. What emerges is not simply collaboration, but a transformative mode of relation: a poetics grounded in exchange, where the self is neither prior to nor independent from the other, but continuously shaped in the very act of poetic exchange. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/13/a-review-of-therapon-by-dan-beachy-quick-and-bruce-bond-2/

A review of Antediluvian by Kameryn Alexa Carter

Clearly seeing herself in the tradition of western poetry, in addition to John Berryman, Carter alludes to Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bob Kaufman, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henry Dumas, and Reginald Shepherd. Moreover, there seem to be several references to another mystical poet, Walt Whitman. In “Devil-May-Care” she writes, “I cannot contain / my spirit. Neither multitudes, in fact.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/11/a-review-of-antediluvian-by-kameryn-alexa-carter/

A review of Ground to Stand On by Sandra Djwa

Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend.) Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/10/a-review-of-ground-to-stand-on-by-sandra-djwa/

A review of Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner

Some ideologies have little use for such sentiments, but Garner’s new collection hearkens back to themes that came across even more powerfully in the work of Australia’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick White, who contrasted the sedate, not to say dysfunctional, existence of wealthy suburban Sydneysiders with the bold, tough character of explorers who set off into the Outback to grapple with life on the most elemental level, without concern for fashionable dogmas, changing mores, or social acceptance. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/07/a-review-of-stories-the-collected-short-fiction-by-helen-garner/

Yesterday and Today: a review of Pyre by Chris Dean

Slavery exists, and this poet knows it. “Throw-away lives” is the very thing Chris Dean is combatting to eradicate. Right now, there are North Korean women in a Chinese fish factory who are, in fact, slaves. They are the many making a profit for the few, and any means justify the ends. This is the deplorable thing this poet is fighting against, this and other oppressions elsewhere. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/05/yesterday-and-today-a-review-of-pyre-by-chris-dean/

A review of How to Read a City by Elizabeth Walton

The poems in How to Read a City feel urgent to me, speaking as they do of ecological destruction and complicity. The elegiac feel is so delicately contrasted with the many musical resonances and the inherent call to take note of the beauty and joy that is still with us, however endangered. Everything “is a work of art”, and the final poem in the collection, “Soil Punk City”, makes clear, there is always a hope of renewal in urban regeneration in soil, planing, leaning to work together. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/04/a-review-of-how-to-read-a-city-by-elizabeth-walton/

The Alchemist: A Journey of Personal Legend

It is blindingly clear that what makes The Alchemist one of Paulo Coelho’s most epic and memorable novels is his ability to spin a simple story with a deep message. He evokes something human and universal that haunts everyone, everywhere: the pursuit of dreams. This pursuit is what keeps people alive, hopeful, and strong. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/04/the-alchemist-a-journey-of-personal-legend/

Inside The Video: Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair

Even if World’s Fair doesn’t fit neatly into the horror genre, Schoenbrun does play with the expectations that we bring to horror films. We know that the film contains a source of danger, but our sense of what that source is keeps shifting. Is it the curse? Is it JLB? Or is it some darkness within Casey herself? In a brilliant move, Schoenbrun shifts the point of view halfway through the film, so that we follow JLB instead of Casey. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/05/03/inside-the-video-jane-schoenbruns-were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair/

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 3,744) which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

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LITERARY NEWS

In the news this month, I love seeing the little houses filled with books known as “The Little Free Library” all over the place. It’s nonprofit organisation has named recipients of its eighth annual Todd H. Bol Awards for Outstanding Achievement, honouring “six exceptional individuals and organisations that exemplify LFL’s mission to build community, inspire readers, and expand book access for all.” Check out this year’s winners and their cute little libraries here: https://littlefreelibrary.org/stewards/todd-bol-awards/

Commonwealth Foundation Creatives has announced finalists for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The overall winner is scheduled to be revealed in late June. The five finalists and their respective winning stories are: Africa: “Me and Ma’am” by Lisa-Anne Julien (South Africa), Asia: “Mehendi Nights” by Sharon Aruparayil (India), Canada and Europe: “The Bastion’s Shadow” by John Edward DeMicoli (Malta), Caribbean: “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir (Trinidad and Tobago), and Pacific: “Second Skin” by Holly Ann Miller (New Zealand). Chosen from 7,806 entries, the second highest number in the Prize’s history, the five winners represent the best of contemporary short fiction from across the Commonwealth.

Winners were announced for the 2026 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honouring the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction, and television, and sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America. Best novel was The Big Empty by Robert Crais (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam’s Sons). The full list can be found here: https://mysterywriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026EdgarWinnersTTD.pdf

Maggie Helwig’s Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (Coach House Books) won the C$40,000 Writers Trust of Canada Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, which recognises a “book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers and has the potential to shape or influence thinking on contemporary Canadian political life.”

Erika Krouse has won the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, sponsored by the New Literary Project and honouring “emerged and continually emerging writers of major consequence–short stories and/or novels–at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career.” Her most recent publication is a book of short stories, Save Me, Stranger (Flatiron Books). The award has a $US50,000 prize, and Krouse will spend a brief residence during the 2026 NewLit Roadshow at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area, including Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking in a variety of educational and literary settings–in October.

Angela Antle won the BMO Winterset Award, which celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, for her book The Saltbox Olive. Antle received C$12,500, while the two finalists were given C$3,000 each: Debbie McGee for Cautiously Pessimistic and Mackenzie Nolan for Veal.

Finalists in four categories have been named for the 2026 Doug Wright Awards, which celebrate excellence in the field of Canadian comics. The awards ceremony will be held in Toronto on June 6. Each winner receives a small cash prize, with the winner of the Nipper (for emerging talent) award getting a week-long stay at the Valleyview Artist Retreat, in Caledon, Ont. See the complete list of finalists here: https://dougwrightawards.com/announcing-the-nominees-of-the-2026-doug-wright-awards/

Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (Gallery Books) has won the $US50,000 Gotham Book Prize, which honours the best fiction or nonfiction book that is about New York City or takes place in New York City. The award was created in 2020 by Bradley Tusk, owner of P&T Knitwear, the independent bookstore, and Howard Wolfson, who works for Bloomberg Philanthropies. McNally is the restaurateur who founded Balthazar Restaurant, Balthazar Bakery, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, Pravda, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, Morandi, Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Café Luxembourg, and the Odeon. McNally is the co-author of The Balthazar Cookbook and Schiller’s Liquor Bar Cocktail Collection, and the writer and director of two features, End of the Night and Far from Berlin.

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) and HQ, a publishing division of HarperCollins have announce that Karen Howie Casey has won the 2026 ASA/HQ Fiction Prize for unpublished manuscripts with her book All the Little Wide Worlds. Karen Howie Casey is a former journalist, fiction writer, and communications professional. Her work has been published in newspapers, lifestyle, industry and literary magazines, and online. Karen will receive a publishing contract with HQ and a $A10,000 advance against royalties. The runner-up is Sonya Gellert with Best Served Cold, a darkly satirical novel set amid Sydney’s glossy food media scene. Sonya will receive $A500 and a year’s membership of the ASA.

Finalists have been selected for the $US100,000 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, in association with the National Library of Israel, which goes to “an emerging writer who demonstrates the potential for continued contribution to the world of Jewish literature.” The finalists: Laura Hobson Faure, for Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale University Press), Shaul Kelner, for A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press), Jordan Salama, for Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story (Catapult), and Amir Tibon, for The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands (Little, Brown).

The Writers’ Union of Canada has released a shortlist for the C$10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which recognises “the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2025 in the English language.” Two finalists are also awarded C$1,000 (about US$730) each. The winners will be named in June. This year’s shortlisted titles are: A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway, Seeing You Home by Catherine Hunter, Good Victory by Mikka Jacobsen, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin by Tracey Lindberg, and My Thievery of the People by Leila Marshy.

Cannon by Australian cartoonist Lee Lai is the winner of this year’s Stella Prize. The announcement was made last night at a ceremony in Brisbane. The win marks the first time a graphic novel has received the top honour in the award’s history; Lai’s debut book, Stone Fruit, was shortlisted in 2022. Worth $A60,000, the Stella Prize is awarded annually to ‘the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer’.

The Griffin Poetry Prize has named Raúl Zurita as the 2026 recipient of the Lifetime Recognition Award, given to international artists working in poetry. Zurita will participate in the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize Readings on June 3 with his translator, Anna Deeny Morales. Their reading will be part of a live performance by Armenian-Canadian pianist/composer Eve Egoyan, with filmmakers Lior Shamriz and Chloé Griffin paying homage to Zurita’s poetry throughout.The event will feature the announcement of the international Griffin Poetry Prize winner, as well as readings by the 2026 shortlisted poets and the Canadian First Book Prize winner. The international Griffin Poetry Prize winner will receive C$130,000 while the other shortlisted authors each get C$10,000. Zurita, the Lifetime Recognition Award recipient, receives C$25,000.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s debut collection, Joy Is My Middle Name (W.W. Norton), won the £20,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for “the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under. The Prize celebrates the international world of fiction in all its forms, including poetry, novels, short stories and drama.”

The winners of the 2026 NSW Literary Awards have been announced, with $A320,000 awarded across 12 categories. Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions by Clare Wright has won Book of the Year and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction. Christina Stead Prize for Fiction: The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni (Black Inc). Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: How To Emerge by Jill Jones (Vagabond Press). Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature: Gone by Michel Streich (Thames & Hudson Australia). Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature: Desert Tracks by Marly Wells and Linda Wells (Magabala Books). Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting: The Black Woman of Gippsland by Andrea James (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press). Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Episode 4 by Shaun Grant (Curio Pictures, Screen Australia, Amazon MGM Studios). Indigenous Writers’ Prize: Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin (Wakefield Press). Multicultural NSW Award: Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath by S. Shakthidharan (Powerhouse Publishing). UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing: Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar (NewSouth Publishing), and The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award: Rapture by Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin).

Finalists have been unveiled for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (nonfiction), both of which aim to encourage good writing and thinking about politics as well as meet Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art.” The winners will be named June 25. Finalists for all four Orwell Prize categories are available here: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-prizes/finalists/

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King (Graywolf Press) from Mandarin Chinese, has won the International Booker Prize 2026, supported by Bukhman Philanthropies. The award honours “the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland.” The £50,000 prize money is divided equally between author and translator. The chair of the judges, Natasha Brown, said it succeeded “as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel”.

Gliff by Ali Smith won the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award, which is sponsored by Dublin City Council to promote excellence in world literature and honours a single novel published in English. Nominations are chosen from public libraries around the world and recognise both writers and translators. The prize is presented at a special ceremony during the International Literature Festival Dublin.

The winners of Barnes & Noble’s annual Children’s & YA Book Awards are: Overall and Young Reader: The School for Thieves by Peter Burns (Aladdin), Picture Book: Broken by X. Fang (Tundra Books), and Young Adult: The Secret Astronomers by Jessica Walker (Viking Books for Young Readers).

Perpetual, the trustee of the A$60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, has released this year’s longlist celebrating “novels of the highest literary merit that tell stories about Australian life.” This year’s shortlist will be released in June, with the winner named in August. The longlisted titles are: Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah, I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena, Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens, Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan, First Name, Second Name by Steve Minon, My Heart at Evening by Konrad Muller, Fierceland by Omar Musa (check out my interview with Omar, focused on his album The Fullness), Little World by Josephine Rowe, Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts, and You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson.

Chautauqua Institution has announced the shortlist for the 2026 Chautauqua Prize, honouring “a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honour the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts”: Universality: A Novel by Natasha Brown (Random House), Flashlight: A Novel by Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), O Sinners! A Novel by Nicole Cuffy (One World), Old School Indian: A Novel by Aaron John Curtis (Zando – Hillman Grad Books), Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd (Haymarket Books), The River Is Waiting: A Novel by Wally Lamb (Scribner), and This Is Your Mother: A Memoir by Erika J. Simpson (Scribner).

Finally, The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation has released a shortlist for the £10,000 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, which is open to writers of any nationality writing in English. The winner will be named September 17 in London. This year’s shortlisted titles are: The Tarot Reader of Versailles by Anya Bergman, Boudicca’s Daughter by Elodie Harper, Esperance by Adam Oyebanji, The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao, White Road by Harry Whitehead, and Poor Girls by Clare Whitfield.

Have a great month.

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Kathleen Gardiner who won a copy of An Old Man’s Darling by Deborah K. Shepherd.

Our new giveaway is for 2 copies of The Millionaire Mop: Your Path to Cleaning Business Wealth by Nats Cleaning. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Millionaire Mop” and your postal address in the body of the mail.

Good luck!

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