Patrick deWitt on Booker Shortlist!

Canadian-born-but-Portland-based author Patrick deWitt has made it through to the shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for fiction for his novel The Sisters Brothers! The other five authors/books on the shortlist announced today are Julian Barnes for The Sense of an Ending, Carol Birth for Jamrach's Menagerie, Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English, and A.D. Miller for Snowdrops.

Barnes is the oddsmakers' favorite to win this year, but that doesn't always pan out. He has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. Birch has made the longlist once before. The others are first-time nominees, and Kelman and Miller are debut novelists. We wrote about the full longlist in a previous blog post last month. The prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The winner, who receives the equivalent of about $80,000, will be announced on October 18th. Last year's winner was Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question.

DeWitt was also honored this week by being one of seventeen writers selected to the 2011 longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most distinguished literary prize, awarding $50,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. Finalists on the shortlist receive $5,000. The award was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honor of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. In September 2005, Scotiabank was proud to become the first ever co-sponsor of the prize, and it has been known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize ever since.

This year -- the eighteenth year of the prize -- the longlist was selected from 143 books submitted for consideration, a record-setting number of submissions. The shortlist for the Giller will be announced on October 4th, with the winner announced in a ceremony in Toronto on November 8th. Booker shortlister Esi Edugyan also made the longlist for the Giller, along with Alexi Zenter for Touch (gorgeous cover!), Wayne Johnston for A World Elsewhere, Michael Ondaatje for The Cat's Table (publishing in the US next month), Vancouver author Michael Christie for his debut short story collection The Begger's Garden, and Marina Endicott for The Little Shadows. You can read the full long list at the Giller Prize website.

The Finkler Question Wins Booker

Looks like the betting parlors of London will win back the money they lost last year when odds-on favorite Wolf Hall won the Booker. Today, Howard Jacobson was named the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his comic novel, The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury.

Said to have "some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language," The Finkler Question has been described as "wonderful" and "richly satisfying" and as a novel "full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding." The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship that explores what it means to be Jewish today -- a witty novel about a friendship between a radio producer and a philosopher.  Ron Charles of The Washington Post said "no other book has given me such a clear sense of the benevolent disguises that anti-Jewish sentiments can wear."

London author and columnist Jacobson, a prolific writer of comic novels mostly about Jews and Jewish identity since 1983 has been longlisted twice for the Booker Prize -- in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now -- but has never before been shortlisted. The winning selection was a small triumph for humor in fiction, an argument that Mr. Jacobson made in an essay in The Guardian last Saturday:

“There is a fear of comedy in the novel today – when did you last see the word ‘funny’ on the jacket of a serious novel? – that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure,” he wrote. “We have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.”

Listen to David Sax on NPR's "You Must Read This" talking about The Finkler Question here.

We Learn Booker Prize Winner Today

Today's the day we learn the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, an annual contemporary fiction award given to writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. The six finalists for this year's prize are C, by Tom McCarthy; The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson; In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut; The Long Song, by Andrea Levy; Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey; and Room, by Emma Donoghue. Here's a link to a BBC news site with brief interviews with each of the finalists.

In the betting circles (yes, they actually bet on book awards in England), McCarthy is the odds-on favorite, with a big push in bets in the final days for his experimental tale of time and technology that has drawn comparisons to James Joyce. Historically, the bettors choice isn't the winner, but last year Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall became the first odds-on favorite to win. If Carey were to win, he would become the first three-time Booker winner. Of the six finalists, the bestseller at our store has been Room, by Irish-Canadian writer Donoghue.

Interestingly, this year's Booker longlist was one of the strongest selling in recent years, but two of the hottest sellers from the longlist did not make the shortlist: The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.

Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win??

2010 Booker Shortlist Announced

The six finalists for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction have just been announced. Andrew Molton, the chair of the judges, had this to say about the finalists:

"It's been a great privilege and an exciting challenge for us to reduce our longlist of thirteen to this shortlist of six outstandingly good novels. In doing so, we feel sure we've chosen books which demonstrate a rich variety of styles and themes - while in every case providing deep individual pleasures."

Here are the six shortlisted authors for 2010:

• Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
• Emma Donoghue, Room
• Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
• Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
• Andrea Levy, The Long Song 
• Tom McCarthy, C

You can read more about the finalists at the Booker site. Read our previous blog posting to see the full list of thirteen nominated titles. I'm surprised that some of them didn't make the cut, but the Booker is an incredibly competitive prize. Guess I've got a lot more reading to do!

The Glass Room is Terrific!

I don't usually blog about a book I haven't finished reading yet, but the one I'm reading now is SO bloody good it just seems downright mean to wait any longer to let you in on it, if you don't already know about it. The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer (not to be confused with the memoir The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls) offers beautiful rich meaty chewy storytelling. I'm torn between not wanting to stop reading because it's so good (last night I stayed up 'til almost 2 am, telling myself "just one more chapter," and then "just one more chapter," and then again, until my eyes finally gave out) and not wanting to finish it because I know I will be so sad when there's no more of it to read. Frankly, the book could go completely in the toilet in the second half (which I don't expect, given what I've been told by people who have read all the way, not to mention the public accolades), and I would STILL feel comfortable recommending this book, because what I've read so far is just that good.

Here's a brief synopsis: The honeymooning Landauers are filled with the vibrant optimism of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet the modernist architect who builds their dream home for them in Czechoslovakia, a futuristic home made of chrome, glass, and steel. As Viktor, a rich Jewish mogul, and Liesel, a thoughtful, modern gentile, build their life together, their marriage starts to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the approaching storm clouds of WWII and the encroaching Nazi troops. The description on the book jacket sums it up nicely: "Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure -- the Glass Room [the book and the room] contains it all."

The book was a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and was named a Best Book of 2009 by The Economist, The Observer, The Financial Times, and Slate.com, among others. Mawer, who was born in England and spent his childhood there and in Cyprus and Malta, now lives in Italy where he teaches at St. George's British International School. His previous novels include The Fall, The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel's Dwarf (long-listed for the Booker).

I can't say it strongly enough: READ THIS BOOK! And now I must go, so I can return to reading my yummy book.