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Either James Ellroy has gone completely around the bend or he thought it would be fun to mess with Deborah Solomon. Actually, there’s a third possibility: he’s gone completely around the bend and he’s messing with her. A few snippets from the New York Times Magazine‘s Q&A: What about more contemporary forms of expediency, like [...]

Just call him Lance Armstrong. Jonathan Littell has won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt–the first American to do so–for his book Les Bienveillantes (“The Kindly Ones”). The cash award? About $12.50. But the book, which already won the Academie Francaise Grand Prix du Roman, should enjoy a slight sales boost. According to Bloomberg: French sales of [...]

I filed my review of Walter Mosley’s new book, Killing Johnny Fry, this morning. Mosley’s well known for his crime fiction, and he’s also written science fiction, political essays, and the odd work of general fiction, but Killing Johnny Fry represents a completely new direction for him. How new? The book is subtitled “A Sexistential Novel,” which [...]

It’s not easy to found your own holiday. One of my favorite books is McGoorty: The Story of a Billiard Bum, by Robert Byrne (Lyle Stuart, 1972). Danny McGoorty was an old-time, hard-drinking, unreconstructed billiards player–billiards, not pool, he would be sure to point out if he were still alive. Pool is a game played [...]

Fresh from his victory lap after winning the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, Haruki Murakami has won the Franz Kafka Prize. From the Japan Times: Murakami is the sixth recipient of the award. Past winners include Philip Roth of the U.S., Ivan Klima of the Czech Republic and Peter Nadas of Hungary. In the last two years, [...]

The first-ever Dylan Thomas Prize goes, fittingly enough, to a Welshwoman. Welsh author Rachel Trezise has been named the winner of the first £60,000 EDS Dylan Thomas Prize for her collection of short stories Fresh Apples, published by Parthian. The new international prize of over $100,000 will be awarded biennially to writers in English under 30 [...]