Compulsive Reader

Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 26, Issue 11, 1 November 2024

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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 Kyivsky Waltz: A Love Story By KS Lack

To accompany Lack on the journey of Kyivsky Waltz is to follow the arcs of two inseparable love stories, to fathom the depths of her passion for another human being and for Ukraine as it existed before the calamities of the present and as it still exists, outside time, in the mind and soul of a gifted poet. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/29/a-review-of-kyivsky-waltz-a-love-story-by-ks-lack/

A review of Juice by Tim Winton

There has been much made of Juice being a departure for Winton and there’s no denying that this is a different setting to most of his work: the small towns of present day Western Australia. This is set in the ravaged future, but the writing is classic Winton. The location does seem to still be WA, with a rich, if tortured, setting with human relationships at its core. These are mostly familial: a boy and his mother, a child and her carer, two parents and a young child – all recognisable and all rich with the complexities of those relations under the duress of environmental disaster. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/26/a-review-of-juice-by-tim-winton/

A review of Legato Without a Lisp by Sanjeev Sethi

Legato without a Lisp is an orchestration that ties together various life notes that do not fragment our wholeness or create stoppage points between us and those we interact with. The melody created here has a rippling effect that captures and offers, without lecture or dogma, experience-earned wisdom about how to live with one another in the world at large. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/23/a-review-of-legato-without-a-lisp-by-sanjeev-sethi/

A review of Shechinah at the Art Institute by Irwin Keller

It’s hard to pigeonhole Rabbi Irwin Keller’s collection into a genre, but I’ll call these poems and meditations Creative Non-Fiction, the convenient label of “CNF.” He takes an incident and expands it, rabbinic-style, into a parable, a moral lesson, a life lesson. They are mini-essays. They are sermons. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/21/a-review-of-shechinah-at-the-art-institute-by-irwin-keller/

A review of The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis

Many of the poems are metapoetic, exploring both the nature of what the poem is doing and can do, while deftly moving through mythology, Biblical texts, dreams and fantasies, while always grounding the people and settings in a casual domesticity. This may seem like a contradiction, but McManis manages the balance and shifts perfectly. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/19/a-review-of-the-zombie-family-takes-a-selfie-by-ed-mcmanis/

A review of Informed by Alison Stone

Alison Stone’s poetry is a sheer delight to read, not just for the cleverness and elegance of her verses or for the insights to which we can all relate, the regret that we all recognize often comes with the territory of memory, but for the infectious positivity her poems ultimately exude. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/16/a-review-of-informed-by-alison-stone/

A review of The Infant Vine by Isabella G. Mead

Nature accompanies themes of motherhood, memories and imagination. Mead has an incredible control of the language and knowledge about plants and animals which is infused in poetry meticulously created. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/13/a-review-of-the-infant-vine-by-isabella-g-mead/

A Review of Finally Autistic: Finding My Autism Diagnosis as a Middle-Aged Female by Theresa Werba

Werba’s personal reflections and anecdotes are firmly rooted in data: an autism assessment, school report cards that highlight her “unsatisfactory” levels of self-control, and even developmental reports from when she was in preschool (all reproduced in full within these pages). Her blending of subjective reflections with objective data points make this a unique work. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/12/a-review-of-finally-autistic-finding-my-autism-diagnosis-as-a-middle-aged-female-by-theresa-werba/

A review of Boysgirls by Katie Farris

Farris successfully grabs onto the reader and throwing them into the center of the action, along the meta, fourth-wall breaking asides that forces the readers to interact and not just observe. These unnamed characters who are often referred to their functions have broken through those constraining words. These forms created new life, new beings, and new meanings to what literal hybrid forms as Farris proves new literature should be just as bold as she demonstrated. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/11/a-review-of-boysgirls-by-katie-farris/

A review of What Could be Saved by Gregory Spatz

Spatz does an incredible job overlapping themes through the four short stories. Each entry feels like it’s picking up a thread from the previous story and then using that same thread as a baseline or expanding further on it. It also adds to the re-readability of this collection as in “What Could Be Saved”, “We Unlovely, Unloved”, “The Five”, and “Time and Legends” there are whiffs of reoccurring characters or motifs. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/11/a-review-of-what-could-be-saved-by-gregory-spatz/

A review of Dandelion by Heather Swan

This is eloquent language. I find Swan’s syntax convincing and superior to many eco-poets I’ve read throughout the past decade. Her “Crop Duster” carries forth, in poetry, the very concerns Rachel Carson presented in prose in the 1960s and prior. Swan’s “Crop Duster,” (Pg.32-36) written in eight enumerated sections, tells of spraying used to suppress the gypsy moth, of an immune-compromised child, a lump in the girl’s neck. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/10/a-review-of-dandelion-by-heather-swan/

A review of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if it’s a Lie by Steve Wasserman

Steve Wasserman has experienced enough for a handful of lifetimes. He is possessed of a great skill in weaving those allies and moments into a compelling narrative that is clear as a pane of glass. Though there are signs everywhere that he was an adept observer, one that takes good notes and has capacious memory. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/09/a-review-of-tell-me-something-tell-me-anything-even-if-its-a-lie-by-steve-wasserman/

Guess Who’s Written a Children’s Book? An interview with Wayne McDonald

The book is a combination of riddle poems and colorful, charming illustrations, challenging the reader to guess the mysterious animal on the next page. The animals are an eclectic bunch, from the well-known—bison, giraffe—to the more exotic such as the axolotl. The poems sneak in bits of “teacher” information and dashes of puns and humor. (To wit, regarding the axolotl, “You now know a ‘lotl’ about us….”). Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/08/guess-whos-written-a-childrens-book-an-interview-with-wayne-mcdonald/

A review of The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn

Neither The Braille Encyclopedia, nor Rebecca Solnit’s “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” which influenced Cohn, are mere catalogues though. While Solnit comments on the act of remembrance, a travelogue about a vanishing place using the form’s citational structure, Cohn’s use resembles remembering itself. If the absence of this web structure is felt, it also highlights how the book is less about its valid critiques of legalistic definitions of blindness or a piquant connection between the Andean abacus-like Quipu and braille as devices where “stories were stored in arrangements of strands.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/07/a-review-of-the-braille-encyclopedia-by-naomi-cohn/

That Awful Confrontation of Body and Will: Dancers Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko) in The White Crow (Ralph Fiennes, 2018) and Baryshnikov (as Nikolai) in White Nights (Taylor Hackford, 1985)

Ballet is dance—it is delicate movements set to music, illustrating a tale: it is adagio (slow movements) and allegro (rapid movements) and arabesque (the body’s weight on one leg, with the other leg aloft, backward) and changement (change of feet) and fifth position (the heel of one foot against the toe of another, the two feet close, turned out) and plie (bending of a standing leg) and sauté (jump); and it is the life, the creative work, Rudolf Nureyev wanted. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/06/that-awful-confrontation-of-body-and-will-dancers-nureyev-oleg-ivenko-in-the-white-crow-ralph-fiennes-2018-and-baryshnikov-as-nikolai-in-white-nights-taylor-hackford-1985/

A review of Steerage by Robert Cooperman

Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/05/a-review-of-steerage-by-robert-cooperman/

A review of By This Time—Poems by Ian Ganassi

By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/03/a-review-of-by-this-time-poems-by-ian-ganassi/

A review of A Review of The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the origin of Animal Farm by John Reed

Once upon a time, authors’ lives were separate from their works. Readers took the written work from the page. Today, that is not the case. Life and art are inextricably entwined for public consumption. Often, I question the wisdom of this, but in Orwell’s case, it’s valid. Animal Farm is political, and it is reasonable to explore Orwell’s life in order to see the novel in context. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/10/01/a-review-of-a-review-of-the-never-end-the-other-orwell-the-cold-war-the-cia-mi6-and-the-origin-of-animal-farm-by-john-reed/

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 3,422) which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

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LITERARY NEWS

We’ve got even more literary news than usual this month. To begin with, Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson (University of Georgia Press) has won the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honours “the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year” and is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems by Michelle Peñaloza (Persea Books) has won the James Laughlin Award, which is given “to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year.” The award is endowed by the Drue Heinz Trust and sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Besides a cash prize of $5,000, the winner receives a one-week residency at the Betsy Hotel in Miami.

Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal (Simon & Schuster) has won the $15,000 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which aims “to inspire and recognize rising African-American fiction writers of excellence at a national level.” The award is sponsored by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and celebrates the legacy of Ernest Gaines.

The Washington Center for the Book, has named the winners of the 2024 Washington State Book Awards for outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2023. This year’s winning titles are: Fiction: The Laughter by Sonora Jha (HarperVia), Creative nonfiction/memoir: Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House Books), General nonfiction/biography: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan (Viking), Poetry: I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State, edited by Rena Priest (Empty Bowl Press)
YA literature: Painted Devils by Margaret Owen (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
Books for young readers: Duel by Jessixa Bagley, illustrated by Aaron Bagley (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), and Picture books: Ploof by Ben Clanton and Andy Chou Musser (Tundra Books).

The shortlist has been released for the C$60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, which recognizes the best novel or short story collection of the year by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. The winner will be announced November 19. This year’s finalists, who each receive C$5,000 are: What I Know About You by Éric Chacour, translated by Pablo Strauss, Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr, Batshit Seven by Sheung-King, Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin, and Hi, It’s Me by Fawn Parker.

The shortlist has been selected for the £25,000 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, honouring “the best new poetry collection written in English and published in the U.K. or Ireland” and sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation. The winner will be announced January 13. Shortlisted books are: Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus, Lapwing by Hannah Copley, The Penny Dropping by Helen Farish, Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi, High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett, Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann, Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo
Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips, Rhizodont by Katrina Porteous, and Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf.

The winners of the 2024 Ned Kelly Awards, sponsored by the Australian Crime Writers Association and celebrating the best in Australian crime writing, have been named. This year’s winners are: Crime fiction: Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth, Debut crime fiction: Murder in the Pacific–Ilfira Point by Matt Francis, True crime: Crossing the Line by Nick McKenzie, and International crime fiction: The Only Suspect by Louise Candlish.

Three finalists have been selected for the $75,000 2024 Cundill History Prize, which is administered by McGill University and honors “the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and diverse appeal.” The winner will be announced October 30. The finalists: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass (Vintage), Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Random House), and Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth (Liveright).

The shortlist has been selected for the £10,000 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, awarded to a book that is “deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.” The winner will be announced November 6. The shortlist includes All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles, Tell by Jonathan Buckley, Parade by Rachel Cusk
Choice by Neel Mukherjee, Spent Light by Lara Pawson, and Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith.

The shortlisted titles for the annual UK nature and environmental poetry award, the Laurel Prize are: Ruin, Blossom (John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, Lapwing (Hannah Copley, Pavilion Poetry), At the Point of Seeing (Megan Kitching, Otago University Press), Food for the Dead (Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, Jonathan Cape), and Tung (Robyn Maree Pickens, Otago University Press). The Laurel Prize offers a first prize of £5000, second prize of £2000 and third prize of £1000. Additional prizes—Best First Collection UK and Best International First Collection—are each worth £500. In addition, winners will receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite UK landscape.The prize is run by the Poetry School and funded by Simon Armitage’s honorarium as UK Poet Laureate, which he receives annually from King Charles III. Winners will be announced on 19 October.

South Korean writer Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Kang is best known in the English-speaking world for The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth), which won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 and was made into a movie. Her other titles published in English include The White Book, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018; Human Acts: A Novel, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) (see our review here); Greek Lessons, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won (Hogarth) (see our review here); and We Do Not Part: A Novel, translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth). Mongolian Mark won the Yi Sang Literary Prize in 2005, and her novella Baby Buddha won the Korean Literature Novel Award in 1999 and was made into a film. She has published other novels, novellas, and poetry in Korean.

The shortlist has been released for the C$100,000 Giller Prize, which honours “the best Canadian novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English.” The finalists receive C$10,000 each. The winner will be named November 18. The Giller Prize is sponsored by Scotiabank, CBC Books, Mantella Corporation, Indigo, and the Azrieli Foundation. This year’s shortlisted titles are: What I Know About You by Éric Chacour, translated by Pablo Strauss, Curiosities by Anne Fleming, Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
Held by Anne Michaels, and Peacocks of Instagram by Deepa Rajagopalan.

The shortlist has been released for the £50,000 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize, honouring “the best of nonfiction.” The winner will be announced November 19. The shortlist includes The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (British), Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Australian), Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (American), A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese-American), Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (British), Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay.

A shortlist has been released for the Laurel Prize, presented to the best collection of environmental or nature poetry published each year. The prize is funded by U.K. poet Simon Armitage’s laureate’s honorarium, which he receives annually from the King, and is run by the Poetry School. The shortlisted titles are: Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside, Lapwing by Hannah Copley, At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching, Food for the Dead by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, Tung by Robyn Maree Pickens. The winner will be named October 19. The prize awards £5,000 to the winner, with £2,000 for second place and £1,000 for third. There is also a £500 award for each of the best first collection U.K. and best international first collection. In addition, winners will receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite U.K. landscape.

The shortlist has been unveiled for the 2024 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, awarded in memory of Hachette Australia’s former CEO Matt Richell, who died in a surfing accident in 2014. The award is sponsored by the publisher and the Richell family, in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival and Simpsons Solicitors. The winner, who will be named November 27, receives A$10,000, to be donated by Hachette Australia, along with a 12-month mentorship with one of the company’s publishers. Hachette Australia will work with the winning writer to develop their manuscript with the first option to consider the finished work and the shortlisted entries for publication. This year’s shortlisted titles are: Welfare Queens by Rebecca Douglas, Old Monsters by Matt Freeman, We All Fall by Chloe Hillary, Stroke by Myles McGuire, The Calm After the Storm by Averil Robertson, The Interpreter by Mariam Tokhai, and Birthright by Becca Wang.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (New Directions) has won the $25,000 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and given to a writer for a single book-length work of imaginative fiction.

Naomi Shihab Nye has won the $100,000 2024 Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and honouring “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Edenglassie won the ARA Historical Novel Society Australasia’s A$100,000 adult novel prize, one of the richest literary awards in Australia, just a day after winning the A$50,000 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary award,

Evie Shockley has won the 2024 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognises “distinguished poetic achievement” and includes a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Mass.

Finalists have been chosen for this year’s Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in fiction. They are Every Other Universe by Annesha Mitha, A Bunch of Savages by Sofi Stambo, Lagos Will Be Hard for You by Ayotola Tehingbola, and Cattail by Haitao Xu. The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing was created in 2015 to honor outstanding debut literary works by first-generation immigrants, awarded for fiction and nonfiction in alternating years. The winner receives $10,000, a writing residency from Millay Arts, and publication by Restless Books.

Melbourne poet π.O. (Pi.O.) has been announced the winner of the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award. He will receive $20,000 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Australian literature. Born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy, π.O. is a chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, and a highly disciplined anarchist who has worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his art. His two most recent books are HEIDE (2019) and The Tour (2023). He is currently a finalist for the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Barnes & Noble has chosen Swift River by Essie Chambers as the $10,000 Discover Prize Winner, honouring the “best new author published this year.” The title was voted on by B&N booksellers from the company’s monthly Discover picks. The five runners-up were: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, Pearly Everlasting by Tammy Armstrong, 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers by Abraham Chang, Piglet by Lottie Hazell, and Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor.

Winners of the 2024 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose, sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), were announced at an awards ceremony during ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, in Milwaukee, Wis. National Translation Award in Prose winner was The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi, translated from Italian by Jame Richards (And Other Stories). National Translation Award in Poetry winner was And the Street by Pierre Alferi, translated from French by Cole Swensen (Green Linden Press).

Phew! Have a great month.

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Jean Feingold who won a copy of A Wolff in the Family by Francine Falk-Allen. I did inadvertently advertise our November giveaway last month so if you’ve already entered, you don’t need to enter again. If you haven’t, please go for it! I’ll choose winners by the end of the month.

Our new site giveaway this month is for a copy of The Nutcracker Chronicles by Janine Kovac. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Nutcracker Chronicles” and your postal address in the body of the mail.

We also have a copy of Fine by John Patrick Higgins. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Fine” and your postal address in the body of the mail.

Good luck!

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