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ReadySteadyBlog
TEV: "One of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers"
All blog entries tagged with 'IFFP09'
Friday 15 May 2009
Wee weekly round-up
Before I rest up for the weekend, a coupla things to draw your attention to:
- Steve provides us with "a selection that might be called The Best of This Space"
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The Armies by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (as you know, I was judge, and I'm still scratching my head as to how come Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 wasn't even shortlisted!)
- interviews over on The Book Depository site with historian Andy Beckett ("The British 70s are full of political surprisess if you make yourself look at them with fresh eyes... the Labour vote in the 1979 election actually went up, especially among wealthier voters -- the idea that the behaviour of the unions sent the electorate running screaming away from Labour is a myth...") and Thomas Traherne expert Denise Inge ("Readers with imagination fall for Traherne. He takes you on unexpected interior journeys into desire and lack, infinity, time and eternity. Reading him isn't always easy since the language of his day is so different from ours and his world view sometimes challenges the assumptions of our time, but he will thrill, surprise and exhaust you...")
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a brief interview with Béla Tarr
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trailer for new Godard film Socialisme
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, film, IFFP09, personal, politics
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Thursday 02 April 2009
More from Mitchelmore on TKO
Now that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is all but decided (see details about the shortlist here) I'm feeling the need to opinionate so, next week, I'll try to pick up the blogging baton again (not least because I want to write about the IFFP09 shortlist)...
In the meantime, Mr Mitchelmore is in superb form opinionating once again about Littell's The Kindly Ones:
The Kindly Ones is perhaps the first novel I have read and felt the need to write about before any hype kicked in. Had it been another, quieter publication, such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee or Thomas Glavinic's Night Work, then the review itself would have been enough. All three novels, however different and however removed from the vicious modernist circle familiar to this blog, prompted long attention because they opened a space making narrative possible, even necessary. Or, to put it another way, the space became palpable only through writing like this. Each review was an attempt to make this space clear and thereby to ease future readers into a different kind of reading than that practised elsewhere (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, IFFP09, personal
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Friday 27 February 2009
Tonkin on IFFP09
Boyd Tonkin on this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize:
What advice would a seasoned observer of the British book market give to a publisher who, like some demented literary version of Mel Brooks in The Producers, wanted to release a novel that stood absolutely no chance of reaching the bestseller lists? Not a book with some faint glimmer of hope, mind you – but one doomed to hobble in among the stragglers? First, make sure that it's very long, complicated, sometimes eccentric and driven by a quixotic idealism. Second, guarantee that the author – little-known on these shores in any case – is safely dead. And last, make this cast-iron catastrophe a translation. Then retire to a bar and toast your fail-safe flop (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Wednesday 25 February 2009
2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist
Last Monday, Linda Grant, Kate Griffin, Fiona Sampson, Boyd Tonkin and I chose the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist. After hours of discussion, we came down to a list of sixteen:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Wednesday 18 February 2009
IFFP09 longlist -- coming soon
FYI: the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist (of sixteen titles) will be announced next Wednesday! (Following this, the shortlist of six titles will be announced at the end of March, and the winner will be announced mid-April.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Tuesday 10 February 2009
Verhaeghen at JBW2009
As part of Jewish Book week, on Sunday March 1st at 2pm "Paul Verhaeghen and Boyd Tonkin discuss moral choices, writing history and translating one's own work into English." Verhaeghen, as you'll recall, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year with "his extraordinary novel Omega Minor, an exploration of the world of Nazis and Neo-Nazis alike, the destructive logics of The Holocaust and the Bomb, truths that kill and lies that keep alive, passionate love and devouring lust. "
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events, IFFP09
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Thursday 29 January 2009
Busy boy!
Thanks to Nigel Beale and D.G. Myers for responding to my question concerning what should be on a history of the novel reading list with long reading lists of their own. Both Nigel's and D.G.'s lists are very useful (and this bibliography from the University of Warwick has some good pointers too), but I'll compile one of my own here soon which is specifically just about the history of the novel itself. (For starters, my current Book of the Week, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 2, 1100 - 1400, would certainly be on it, as would Robert Mayer's excellent History and the Early English Novel and Nancy Armstrong's flawed engagement with Ian Watt, How Novels Think: The Limits Of Individualism From 1719-1900.)
Really, though, the last thing I should be doing is starting a new project! I'm run off my feet at the moment: we got over 120 submissions for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, (so lots and lots and lots of reading, but nothing I can talk about until after we've longlisted some of them); and I'm also working on getting all sorts of content together for the new look Book Depository website which will land some time in the next couple of weeks.
Whilst all that should be enough for anyone, I'm rather beside myself with excitement as The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 (CUP) has just landed. A bottle of whisky and a few nights without sleep seem in order!
Finally, you'll have all no doubt noticed that Twitter has become all the rage -- despite having been around for quite a while, it suddenly seems to have really taken off. RSB has had a Twitter page for ages (and so has The Book Depository and BritLitBlogs), but I've relied on RSB's RSS feed to do all the tweeting for me and have not actually done much active tweeting myself. Well, expect that to change soon!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: franz kafka, IFFP09, personal, the book depository
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Thursday 27 November 2008
Habermas and Klein
Right. Time to crack open a beer and have a shufty at: Life after bankruptcy -- Jürgen Habermas talks to Thomas Assheuer and Naomi Klein on the Bailout Profiteers and the Multi-Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene (both via wood s lot).
And then, tomorrow, I'm in Big London for the first IFFP09 meeting. In case you were wondering, I'm not allowed to blog about submissions as I'm reading them -- submissions are a secret it would seem. Which strikes me as... bloody daft!
In the background, Gas's Nah Und Fern -- you so need this!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09, politics
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Friday 12 September 2008
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2009
Firstly, do, please, forgive the recent radio silence. I've been out and about (Windsor and Big London) doing exciting Book Depository-related things. The Book Depository recently expanded so lots of cool stuff is going on behind the scenes which you'll see the fruits of soon ...
Regular readers will know that I've always been a bit of fan of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (last year, for example, I called it "by far the most interesting of the UK-based literary prizes [which] always turns up a few gems"). Well, I'm thrilled (and delighted and honoured) to say that I've been asked to be one of the judges for the 2009 prize. Yay! How exciting! 80-odd more books to read, mind! Dunno much more than this for now, but shall report back when I learn more (the judging panel is meeting up for our first natter in a few weeks time).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, IFFP09, personal
PermalinkComments (5)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 29 January 2001
Busy boy!
Thanks to Nigel Beale and D.G. Myers for responding to my question concerning what should be on a history of the novel reading list with long reading lists of their own. Both Nigel's and D.G.'s lists are very useful (and this bibliography from the University of Warwick has some good pointers too), but I'll compile one of my own here soon which is specifically just about the history of the novel itself. (For starters, my current Book of the Week, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 2, 1100 - 1400, would certainly be on it, as would Robert Mayer's excellent History and the Early English Novel and Nancy Armstrong's flawed engagement with Ian Watt, How Novels Think: The Limits Of Individualism From 1719-1900.)
Really, though, the last thing I should be doing is starting a new project! I'm run off my feet at the moment: we got over 120 submissions for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, (so lots and lots and lots of reading, but nothing I can talk about until after we've longlisted some of them); and I'm also working on getting all sorts of content together for the new look Book Depository website which will land some time in the next couple of weeks.
Whilst all that should be enough for anyone, I'm rather beside myself with excitement as The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 (CUP) has just landed. A bottle of whisky and a few nights without sleep seem in order!
Finally, you'll have all no doubt noticed that Twitter has become all the rage -- despite having been around for quite a while now, it suddenly seems to have really taken off. RSB has had a Twitter page for ages now (and so has The Book Depository and BritLitBlogs), but I've relied on RSB's RSS feed to do all the tweeting for me and have not actually done much active tweeting myself. Well, expect that to change soon!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: franz kafka, IFFP09, personal, the book depository
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
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Books of the Week
First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.
-- View archive
To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of 'depressive' black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of 'militant dysphoria' via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction's activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the 'cold world' of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.
-- View archive
Serendipoetry
This World is not Conclusion
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond --
Invisible, as Music --
But positive, as Sound --
It beckons, and it baffles --
Philosophy -- don't know --
And through a Riddle, at the last --
Sagacity, must go --
To guess it, puzzles scholars --
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown --
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies --
Blushes, if any see --
Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
And asks a Vane, the way --
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
Strong Hallelujahs roll --
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul --
-- Emily Dickinson
The Complete Poems (Faber & Faber)
-- View archive
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