The Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to… Kenny G
Rumpus editors share our Nobel Prize in Literature predictions with you!
...morePosts Tagged: Man Booker
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Transit Books
The founders of Transit Books discuss Wioletta Greg’s debut novel, Swallowing Mercury, and the challenges and rewards that come with starting a small independent press.
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J. M. Coetzee’s “Bread and Beans” Writing
I am fixated by this detail of the bread and beans because it strikes me that Coetzee’s prose might itself be described as “bread and beans” writing: short, declarative sentences, with a fairly simple vocabulary.
...more“A Changed World”
Don’t write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that’s not changing. Let that do the work. Paul Beatty’s formally experimental, informally humanely scathing novel about race, The Sellout, has just won the Man Booker Prize. Chris Paul Wolfe interviews Beatty for Guernica, touching on invented languages […]
...moreOn Fame and Getting Rich
When Ottessa Moshfegh wrote the thriller Eileen, a novel recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she did it to get rich, reports Paul Laity for the Guardian: She didn’t want to “keep her head down” and “wait 30 years to be discovered … so I thought I’m going to do something bold. Because there are all […]
...moreJudging a Book by More than Its Cover
Choosing the winner of the largest prize in English Literature is no easy task. Man Booker judge Sam Leith discusses the challenges of taking on this responsibility over at the Guardian.
...moreLiterary Cooties
A recent study by author Nicola Griffith reveals that books written about men were more likely to win major literary prizes over the last fifteen years than books written about women. During this timeframe, 12 Man Booker Prize winners and 10 National Book Award winners were primarily about men or boys. Griffith writes: It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, when […]
...moreSpeed Reading the Man-Booker Shortlist
To test reading software Spritz, an app that helps readers achieve high words-per-minute rates, Rob Boffard decided to start with the Man-Booker shortlist. He used the program to read Joshua Ferris’s 110,000 word novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He achieved upwards of 700wpm, but concludes ultimately that to speed-read novels, the software […]
...moreBritish Insecurity
Among those who bemoaned the change of rules were a number of British novelists. Why did they assume their American counterparts were better? Or if they thought Americans were just different, why did they assume judges would prefer the game the Americans were playing? This year marks the first time that any book written in […]
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