Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 25, Issue 11, 1 Nov 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 dear readers. Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

A review of The Lady in The Bottle by Rozanna Lilley

Lilley is a brilliant writer. She creates pictures with words. Each episode is a short gem with sprinkles of captivating humour. Page by page we enter Jeannie’s life, we read about her travelling with the astronaut in a space capsule, a yacht or a car, we read about her trying to constantly please her master, and forever hoping to get married to him. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/27/a-review-of-the-lady-in-the-bottle-by-rozanna-lilley/

A review of CUT by Samuel Lucas Allen

CUT is a film that is, quite frankly, unforgettable. As a coming-of-age story, Daniel’s transition is one that well, cuts deeply while allowing the visuals and music to do most of the talking. The production is excellent, and the music, cinematography and consistently top notch acting makes for an emotive and deeply moving film which with wide appeal. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/25/a-review-of-cut-by-samuel-lucas-allen/

A review of 2 Mini Chapbooks (Cup & Dagger series) by Sword & Kettle Press

I was happy to expand my literary horizons through these samples from a decidedly non-mainstream speculative series. “Good things come in small packages,” goes the old saying, and there’s no shortage of humongous talent here. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/22/a-review-of-2-mini-chapbooks-cup-dagger-series-by-sword-kettle-press/

A review of Thine by Kate Partridge

Who we are and what will happen in the future is a notion that is always evolving in her work. She explores what it is to be an individual existing among so many people and the vastness and inspiration of nature and art. And Kate Partridge questions everything, especially decisions and actions. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/19/a-review-of-thine-by-kate-partridge/

A review of Time Taken: New and Selected Works by Les Wicks

A poetic journeyman and warrior whose work in writing and community throughout his life crisscrosses the globe. His beautiful new book Time Taken – New & Selected is a compendium of that life, full of treasures – wisdom, observations and raw evocations of the man himself. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/16/a-review-of-time-taken-new-and-selected-works-by-les-wicks/

A review of Dancing Dots by Brenda Eldridge

There are poems in this collection that describes events which many of us experience like waking at 3.00 am and being unable to go back to sleep, or being super tired after looking after children or admiring a fancy car that we never could afford. Empathy, love, compassion and wishes are also themes in this collection. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/15/a-review-of-dancing-dots-by-brenda-eldridge/

A review of The Hurricane Book by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

Acevedo-Quiñones includes family trees and freely admits that some of her facts are speculation, sometimes pieced together from “drunken spill sessions,” hearsay, half-remembered conversations. “Secrets are our family members, too,” after all, as she wisely points out in the vignette, “Secreto.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/12/a-review-of-the-hurricane-book-by-claudia-acevedo-quinones/

Conjuring the Artist: A review of The Daughter of Man by L.J. Sysko

L.J. Sysko’s Daughter of Man is an exquisite dance in which form, function, image, and metaphor shape a discernible allegory of embodied personae. And while these speakers delight the reader with a variety of references to pop culture, they also serve as reminders of our shared historical narratives, ones we cannot let slip from our cultural memories. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/10/conjuring-the-artist-a-review-of-the-daughter-of-man-by-l-j-sysko/

A review of take me for tame by Shoshanna Rockman

Shoshonna Rockman’s debut poetry collection, take me for tame, is anything but tame. These are fierce poems, rooted in an exuberant defiance that works through oppression to find triumph. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/08/a-review-of-take-me-for-tame-by-shoshanna-rockman/

An interview with Robbie Couch

New York Times bestselling author Robbie Couch talks with Nick Havey about his latest queer YA romcom, his settings, on baking, why everything is blue, characters and side characters, time loops, mistakes and lots more. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/05/an-interview-with-robbie-couch/

A Predictable Loop: A review of If I See You Again Tomorrow by Robbie Couch

Stories focusing on time travel, or repetitive time travel, have always been spaces to explore the same experience in new ways. Like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, time loop narratives afford the characters, trapped for whatever reason, to try out new choices, new dialogue, and new interactions all in service of unraveling the loop and returning to the timestream they left. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/05/a-predictable-loup-a-review-of-if-i-see-you-again-tomorrow-by-robbie-couch/

Dreams, Fairies, and Silent Hollywood: A Q&A with Kathleen Rooney, author of ‘From Dust to Stardust’

The inspiration for A Star Is Born, author of a book of financial tips for women, and one of the world’s most famous flappers, Colleen Moore left a legacy that flourishes in Rooney’s new novel, From Dust to Stardust. The book, full of hope, is an elegantly told fictionalized version of her life, under the new name Doreen O’Dare. In this interview, Rooney talks about some of the book’s most powerful themes. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/03/dreams-fairies-and-silent-hollywood-a-qa-with-kathleen-rooney-author-of-from-dust-to-stardust/

A review of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél

Harél searches for joy with the recognition of how much we are up against in the world. His has a willingness to see sharply the challenges and obstacles that are often devastatingly difficult to understand—to admit joy through inquiry and truth. If we do not see clearly, we are victims of magical thinking, wholly unprepared for those inevitable struggles and painful circumstances that are unavoidable. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/10/02/a-review-of-let-our-bodies-change-the-subject-by-jared-harel/

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 3,224) 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, Thunderstone by Nancy Campbell has won the £3,000 2023 Ackerley Prize, formerly known as the PEN Ackerley Prize, honouring memoir and autobiography.

Shortlists have been released for the £2,000 Polari Prize and £1,000 (Polari First Book Prize, U.K. and Ireland awards for LGBTQ+ literature. The prizes are sponsored by literary PR consultancy FMcM Associates and the D H H Literary Agency. The winners’ prize ceremony will be held November 24. Full list of shortlisted authors can be found here: https://www.polarisalon.com/polari-prize/

First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity by Maurizio Valsania (Johns Hopkins University Press) has won the $50,000 2023 George Washington Prize. Conferred by George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College, the award honours “the year’s best new books on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance a broad public understanding of early American history.” The jury chose three other finalists: Mary Sarah Bilder for Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (University of Virginia Press); Fred Kaplan for His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer (Harper); and Stacy Schiff for The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (Little, Brown).

The shortlist for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize has been selected. The winner, who receives $15,000, will be announced on December 5 at the Center for Fiction Annual Awards Benefit. The shortlist includes Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo (Ecco), Lookout by Christine Byl (Deep Vellum/A Strange Object), Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson (McSweeney’s), Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks (Algonquin Books), Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton (Ecco), We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White (Astra House), and Y/N by Esther Yi (Astra House).

The shortlist has been selected for the £25,000 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize, which is judged by poets and honours “the best new poetry collection written in English and published in the U.K. or Ireland.” The winner will be announced January 15. The shortlist includes Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant, More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty, A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke, The Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson, Hyena! by Fran Lock, The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Balladz by Sharon Olds, and I Think We’re Alone Now by Abigail Parry.

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse for his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” the Swedish Academy announced. Fosse, who receives 11 million Swedish krona, has written more than 40 plays, novels, short stories, children’s books, poetry, and essays. The Academy said that Fosse’s “magnum opus in prose” is Septology, which he completed in 2021 and was published in several volumes. Another key work is Trilogy (2016), “a cruel saga of love and violence with strong Biblical allusions, [which] is set in the barren coastal landscape where almost all of Fosse’s fiction takes place.” It was published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive Press.

The shortlist has been released for the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, which is marking its 25th anniversary. The winner will be announced November 16. The other shortlisted authors will receive £5,000. This year’s shortlisted titles are: Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes (U.K.), Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan (U.K.), Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark (Australia), Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler (U.S.), Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans (U.S.), and Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant (U.S.-Canada).

The three winners of the 2023 Kirkus Prize were announced. Each winner receives $50,000. For Fiction: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead). For Nonfiction: Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’ by Héctor Tobar (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and for Young Readers’ Literature: America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History by Ariel Aberg-Riger (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins).

Winners have been announced for the 2023 Goddard Riverside social justice book prizes. Food for Hope: How John van Hengel Invented Food Banks for the Hungry by Jeff Gottesfeld (Creston Books) has won the Goddard Riverside CBC Youth Book Prize for Social Justice. Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See by Richard D. Kahlenberg (PublicAffairs) has won the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

Woppa Diallo and Mame Bougouma Diene won the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing for “A Soul of Small Places,” which was first published in Africa Risen (Tordotcom, 2022). The Guardian reported that lawyer and activist Diallo’s “experiences of gender-based violence in Senegal were the inspiration” for the story. “French-Senegalese American humanitarian and short story writer Diene worked with her to create a fictional Woppa Diallo, who narrates her story against a backdrop of African cosmology in which spirits and humans coexist.”

Finalists have been announced for the 2023 Cundill History Prize, which honours “the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal,” and is administered by McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The winner, to be named November 8, receives $75,000 and the two runners up $10,000. This year’s 3 finalists are: Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan, Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions by Kate Cooper, and Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner.

Winners have been named for the 2023 Forward Prizes for Poetry, which this year include a new category: best single poem–performed. Run by the Forward Arts Foundation, the awards are sponsored by Bookmark Content. Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self Portrait as Othello won the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora Poems took the £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for debut collection. Malika Booker’s “Libation” topped the £1,000 best single poem–written category, and Bohdan Piasecki ‘s “Almost Certainly” won the £1,000 best single poem–performed prize.

The 81st World Science Fiction Convention has announced the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer. The announcement was made live via the Chengdu Worldcon website on October 21st. For best novel, the winner was Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher (Tor Books). For the full, extensive list of winners and runners up, visit: https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2023-hugo-awards/

Jillian Horton won the C$10,000 2022 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction for her book We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing. Granted annually by Wilfrid Laurier University, the prize recognises Canadian writers for a first or second work of creative nonfiction that includes a Canadian locale and/or significance.

In Memory of Memory by Russian author Maria Stepanova is the 2023 recipient of the 750,000 Swedish kronor Berman Literature Prize, which recognises an author whose works embody the statutes of the prize “in the spirit of the Jewish tradition and literary works aiming to explore the rich Jewish culture and at the same time ‘exceed times and cultures’ thereby striving for the universally human.”

Alex Skovron has won the 2023 Patrick White Literary Award, honouring an author who has “made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition,” Books+Publishing reported. Established by Patrick White with the proceeds from his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, the award is worth A$20,000. Skovron has won several major prizes, including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the ABR (now Peter Porter) Prize, and for his first book The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His collection Towards the Equator (2014) was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, while his novella The Poet (2005) was a joint winner of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award for fiction. His work has been translated into many other languages, including Czech, French and Dutch.

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced finalists for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards, which “celebrate works published in Canada, in both official languages, across seven categories, and include books for readers of all ages.” Category winners, who will be named November 8, receive C$25,000. The publisher of each winning book receives C$3,000 to support promotional activities, and finalists each receive C$1,000. A complete list of finalists is available here: https://ggbooks.ca/#finalists

Finally, Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (Stelliform Press) has won the $25,000 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which is “given to a writer for a single book-length work of imaginative fiction.”

Have a great month!

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to LuAnn Morgan who won a copy of The Broken Hummingbird by Anne Marie Jackson.

Congratulations also to K Peters who won a copy of Send In The Tort Lawyer$.

Our new giveaway this month is for a copy of Finding Sunlight by Chrissy Holm.

We also have a copy of The Counting House by Gary Sernovitz.

To win, please send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “giveaway” and in the body of the email let me know which books (either or both) you would like to win and your postal address.

Good luck!

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