Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 18

TINKERS WINS PULITZER

I beg Marisa Silver's leave to briefly step on her guest blogging toes to announce my delirious happiness that Paul Harding's luminous Tinkers has won the Pulitzer Prize.

I have loved this book since I read it as part of the First Fiction Award I judged last year and have been meaning to add it to my Recommended sidebar ever since.  (It's a sign of how things have slipped around here that I have not been able to do so yet.)  Well, the book no longer needs my imprimatur, and I hope it will...

The Rules of the Game

Greetings. I am guestblogging this week, a role that I think must feel something like being agrandparent. You get to roll around on the floor, make silly faces, and thenjust when things get a bit overwhelming and you've had enough, or someone needshis diaper changed, you get to leave. This week's postings will stray from the moretypical EV fare - the thoughtful and intelligent commentary on the literary world at large. Instead, I'll be talking about the literary world at, well, small. In...

THREE MINUTE INTERVIEW (3MI): MARISA SILVER

I've been a fan of Marisa Silver since I reviewed her lovely novel The God of War for the Barnes & Noble Review, a book I felt "unfold[ed:] in precise, gripping measure."

Silver has reached a mere 170 miles beyond the limits of her Los Angeles
home and delivered a vivid dispatch from another world, utterly
different yet all too familiar, in which her battered family wants
nothing more than to keep "safe from the incessant harms that came of
living."

This week, her new short story...

WHEN BABY MEETS iPHONE

Oops.  Sorry, daddy ...

FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT

A story about Yann Martel's quixotic attempt to get his Prime Minister reading opens with this very amusing anecdote:

A late friend -- God rest his cynical soul -- once doubted that the literary novels he was loaning to his new love interest were actually being read. So our friend discreetly taped a few pages together in the middle of the next book that had been eagerly requested -- The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst, as I recall -- and loaned it to his lover du jour. A week later, the...

MOVE OVER, KAZUO

Michael Ondaatje, lyricist.

GUEST INTERVIEW: DENISE HAMILTON

GUEST INTERVIEW WITH DENISE HAMILTON
BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Aside from writing the nationally best-selling Eve Diamond crime novels, Denise Hamilton also edited 2007's award-winning Los Angeles Noir (Akashic Books) which featured seventeen stories by such writers as Michael Connelly, Susan Straight, Janet Fitch and Hector Tobar.

Hamilton now brings us Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics with stories by Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, James Ellroy, Leigh Brackett, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross...

BEFORE I DIE ...

... the Hay Festival is high on my to do list.  Preferably as an author, but I'd settle for attendee.  Look at this year's schedule, you'll see why.

"THE COLOUR INSIDE MY MIND"

With the latest John Banville novel making its way in the world, and a new Benjamin Black novel about to make an appearance, the author of both chats with the Herald on subjects ranging from the legacy of the Celtic Tiger to artistic bullying to the scandal rocking the church.

"You can know and choose not to know at the same time," he says bleakly. "The Germans did that. The Turks did it and are still doing it with the Armenians. The Rwandans did it. This is a very, troubled, dark, little...

"NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO LIVE WITHOUT BEING SHOCKED"

As if the glorious His Dark Materials trilogy wasn't already reason enough to revere Phillip Pullman: