The other N word

A DIFFERENT STRIPE: Lawrence Hill writes in today's Guardian book blog about why the title of his Commonwealth Prize–winning historical novel, The Book of Negroes , was changed by its American publisher to Someone Knows My Name.

All the happy families – Carlos Fuentes

Master of Spanish literature who will celebrate this year 80^th birthday, finally decided to do this, what every decent writer thinks of – pertain to the first sentence from Lew Tolstoy`s “Anna Karenina” and develop it on his own way. Tolstoy starts with the statement that: “All the happy families are similar, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This sentence opens for the writer many new doors and gives plenty of possibilities.

Fuentes did realize it very well, that`s why he wrote sixteen different stories of different families and divided them with choirs which sound and look like poems written by American representatives of Big-Beat generation.

After lecture, putting all the plots and pieces together – it requires from the reader plenty of attention and it`s not so easy – we are given a picture of Mexican society torn apart. A society convincingly different from the one we already know from other charming novel “Summer with Laura Diaz”.

“Violence, violence” are last words of the book, dangerously coexisting with Tolstoy`s sentence. When family falls apart, everything falls apart.

 Summarized by Fusinha

Press Release: Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press

THE CHICAGO BLOG: If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late.

Frey Lives On

THE MILLIONS: At first I couldn't tell if Janet Maslin's review of James Frey's novel Bright and Shiny Morning was a joke or not. I guess she liked the book, but her homage to Frey's style is so terrible, the start-stop prose so laughably bad, that I assumed she was making fun of the poor guy:

The Millions breaks it down

THE MILLIONS: Max’s recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American “Prizewinners” got me wondering… what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period?

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