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A Cornish beach thought to have been the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse sold at auction yesterday for £80,000 (about $130,000). The seventy-six acres of Upton Towans beach in Gwithian went to an unnamed buyer from London, who trumped competing bids from as far afield as Russia and the United States.
From over one hundred entries from twelve African countries, Nigerian writer EC Osondu emerged as winner of the tenth annual Caine Prize for African Writing. Osondu received the ten-thousand pound prize (approximately sixteen thousand dollars) for his story "Waiting" from the online magazine Guernica (October 2008). The award, given for a short story by an African writer published in English, was announced last Monday at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Nana Yaa Mensah, chair of the judges, called Osondu’s story "a tour de force describing, from a child’s point of view, the dislocating experience of being a displaced person. It is powerfully written with not an ounce of fat on it—and deeply moving."
Stories published in journals and anthologies as many as five years prior to the deadline are considered for each year's prize. This year's finalists were:
Mamle Kabu of Ghana for "The End of Skill” from Dreams, Miracles and Jazz (Picador Africa, 2008)
Parselelo Kantai of Kenya for “You Wreck Her” from St. Petersburg Review (2008)
Alistair Morgan of South Africa for “Icebergs” from Paris Review (Winter 2007)
Mukoma wa Ngugi of Kenya for “How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile” from Wasafiri (Summer 2008)
Osondu, who once worked as an advertising copywriter and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University, now teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island. As part of the award, Osondu will spend a month in residence at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Cultural theorist Joshua Glenn and journalist Rob Walker last week kicked off an experiment that will test the literary significance of otherwise useless objects. As curators of the "Significant Objects" project, the duo are pairing writers with knickknacks picked up for a pittance at thrift stores and flea markets, and asking the scribes to feature the objects in short works of fiction.
Another reason to buy it for the articles: Playboy has scored the first serial rights to an unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The magazine’s December issue will feature a five-thousand-word excerpt from The Original of Laura, which was left in fragmentary form when the author died in 1977.
Graywolf Press has announced plans to move its offices across the Mississippi River from St. Paul to Minneapolis in about two months’ time. The nonprofit publisher will leave the building it has occupied since 1990 to take up new digs in the Traffic Zone Visual Arts Center, located in the city’s trendy Warehouse district.
In celebration of its sixtieth year honoring authors with the National Book Award, the National Book Foundation (NBF) has created a blog that, over the course of the next few months, will revisit all of the winning books of fiction from 1950 to 2008. The book-a-day blog commenced yesterday, with National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner and NBF executive director Harold Augenbraum offering their words about Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm (Doubleday). For the cross-reference-lover, each blog post also suggests links to more information on the book and author, as well as facts about each title, and names of judges and finalists, giving readers an idea of how the awards landscape looked in a given year.
Why focus only on winning fiction? The NBF, which currently grants the award in poetry, nonfiction, and young people’s literature, as well, says on its Web site that the prize in fiction has been the only category that has seen a winner every year since the National Book Awards were instituted. Also, many of the fiction winners have gone on to literary fame, and out of the seventy-seven winning titles, seventy-four are still in print—a higher percentage than in any other genre.
New posts by authors, editors, and other members of the literati will go up daily until September 21—with Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country (Modern Library) closing the series—when the NBF will invite readers to vote for the "Best of the National Book Awards Fiction." (Reminiscent of the Man Booker Prize's celebratory "Best of Booker" competition in 2008.) Voters will have the opportunity to win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards ceremony. The organization has also sent ballots to six hundred writers, asking them to select three of their favorite titles.
More about the sixtieth anniversary campaign can be found on the NBF Web site, or via the organization’s Twitter feed.
A judge in London yesterday sentenced three Muslim men to four-and-a-half years in prison for an arson attack against the publisher of a novel about one of Muhammad’s wives. In September 2008, the trio set fire to the home of Martin Rynja just days before his company, Gibson Square, was due to publish The Jewel of Medina by American author Sherry Jones.
For those unaccustomed to absorbing more than 140 characters at a sitting, Penguin is set to release a volume that pares classic books down to a series of tweet-sized chunks. Twitterature, the brainchild of two University of Chicago freshmen, promises to deliver works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce, and J. K. Rowling in no more than twenty tweets apiece.
A federal judge in New York City last week issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. publication of what attorneys for J. D. Salinger are calling an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
Editors at the independent poetry press Wave Books recently announced that they will host a three-day poetry event in Seattle at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. Slated to run from August 14 to 16, the festival will feature readings, film screenings, exhibitions, discounts on poetry books at fourteen local bookstores, and, according to the organizer’s Web site, wild blackberry picking.
