Book News
Booker finalists announced.
“Ragtime” novelist E.L. Doctorow and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul were among the 14 finalists announced recently for the Man Booker International Prize, given every two years for lifetime achievement by a fiction writer who writes in English or whose work is widely available in English translation.
The list included three Americans — Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates and Evan S. Connell, author of the novels “Mr. Bridge” and “Mrs. Bridge.” Naipaul is a native of Trinidad who lives in England.
The prize is worth around $85,000, and the winner will be announced in May.
Also cited were Australia’s Peter Carey, Mahasweta Devi of Bangladesh, Scottish author James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Arnost Lustig of the Czech Republic, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, Italy’s Antonio Tabucchi, Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Dubravka Ugresic of Croatia and Ludmila Ulitskaya of Russia
Previous winners of the prize, founded in 2004, are Ismail Kadare of Albania and Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.
The Associated Press
First Lines
A Reliable Wife, Robert Goolrick
It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. The world stood stock still, four o’clock dead on. Nothing moved anywhere, not a body, not a bird; for a split second there was only silence, there was only stillness. Figures stood frozen in the frozen land, men, women, and children.
If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.
Children’s picture best sellers
1. Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder
2. Swing! by Rufus Butler Seder
3. The House in the Night, by Susan Marie Swanson, illustrated by Beth Kormmes
4. The Composer Is Dead, by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Carson Ellis, music by Nathaniel Stookey
5. Cat, by Matthew Van Fleet, photographs by Brian Stanton
6. Listen to the Wind, by Greg Mortenson and Susan L. Roth, illustrated by Susan L. Roth
7. Big Words for Little People, by Jamie Lee Curtis, illustrated by Laura Cornell
8. Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy, by David Soman and Judy Davis, illustrated by David Soman
9. Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, by Mo Willems
10. Wabi Sabi, by Mark Reibstein, illustrated by Ed Young
Publishers Weekly
