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This clip features the trailer for The Little Prince, the first animated feature film adaptation of the classic 1943 French novella, Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Directed by Mark Osborne and voiced by actors including Jeff Bridges, Marion Cotillard, Benicio del Toro, James Franco, Rachel McAdams, and Paul Rudd, the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 and will be released in the U.S. on August 5.
“If you look at the Greek myths, they’re always about unhappy families; Aristotle told us that politics starts in the family—I think that’s true.” Deborah Levy, whose most recent novel, Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, 2016), is shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, talks about the elements of family in Hamlet that have always haunted her. This video is part of the Hay Festival: Talking About Shakespeare video series celebrating William Shakespeare’s four hundredth anniversary.
“I think that with writing, it’s really a space that you own...this sort of free space where you’re really sure of what you’re doing and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or what sorts of boxes even exist out there.” Amanda Lee Koe, author of Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram Books, 2013) and winner of a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Ten Years of Marriage by Su Qing, talks about the relationship between her creative process and inspirations, which include the city of Singapore.
This week, find a short story you wrote in the past and reread it, making note of new observations about the characters and their actions, as well as pacing and style. Then, write a sequel to the story that either takes place immediately after the ending of the original or far off into the future. Use the experiences and wisdom you yourself have gained in the window of time since writing the original story to imbue your characters with newfound maturity, insight, and energy as they face fresh challenges.
“You have to really free your mind from the word obligation.” During an event at the Center for Fiction, authors Francisco Goldman, Idra Novey, and Rivka Galchen answer questions from the audience about moving between fiction and other genres, which leads to a discussion about the importance of donuts.
“At that moment when I started it, it was an act of complete desperation—I didn't know I was writing a book!” In this clip from an interview with filmmaker Martin Rumsby, Chris Kraus talks about the origins and inspiration for her first novel, I Love Dick (Semiotext(e), 1997), which has been adapted for an upcoming television series directed by Jill Soloway, and starring Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn.
As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa Gyasi, Masande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.
In this video, Ottessa Moshfegh accepts the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award for her debut novel, Eileen (Jonathan Cape, 2016). The book is one of four debut novels longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
This morning, the longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced. The annual award of £50,000 (approximately $66,000) is given for a work of fiction originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom by a writer of any nationality.
The thirteen longlisted books are:
The Sellout (Oneworld) by Paul Beatty (U.S.); The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker) by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa, Australia); Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape) by A.L. Kennedy (U.K.); Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton) by Deborah Levy (U.K.); His Bloody Project (Contraband) by Graeme Macrae Burnet (U.K.); The North Water (Scribner) by Ian McGuire (U.K.); Hystopia (Faber & Faber) by David Means (U.S.); The Many (Salt) by Wyl Menmuir (U.K.); Eileen (Jonathan Cape) by Ottessa Moshfegh (U.S.); Work Like Any Other (Scribner) by Virginia Reeves (U.S.); My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking) by Elizabeth Strout (U.S.); All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape) by David Szalay (Canada, U.K.); and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books) by Madeleine Thien (Canada).
The judges—Amanda Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent, and Olivia Williams—selected this year’s finalists from 155 books published between October 1, 2015, and September 30, 2016. Foreman, the 2016 chair, said of this year’s finalists, “From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a long list to be relished.” The list includes four debut novels and one former double winner, J. M. Coetzee, who received the prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K, and again in 1999 for Disgrace.
The shortlist of six finalists will be announced on Tuesday, September 13, at a press conference in London. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500. The winner will be announced on Tuesday, October 25, at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall.
First awarded in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious English-language prizes for literary fiction. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, and Marlon James, whose 2015 winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, has sold over 315,000 copies in the U.K. and commonwealth to date, and is translated in twenty languages.
“Usually I find something that won’t seem like an unfair end.” Novelist and translator Clemens Setz speaks with Louisiana Channel about the importance of the final sentence in a book, and the various ways authors like Jack Kerouac, John Irving, and Thomas Bernhard have written their last sentences.
