The Places You Will Go

The decade's best unread books | Books | guardian.co.uk

Noughtie omissions ... some of the bestsellers-that-weren't

My bookseller friend, Kit, and I were just talking about how we own a lot of books that no one else buys or notices. This piece features some very good books that have just, for some reason or other, failed to sell.

I've only read The Spare Room by Helen Garner. Eric Forbes got it for me after I told him that I'd heard a podcast interview with the author and thought the book sounded interesting.

I really enjoyed The Spare Room. It was painful to read, but, at the same time, liberating. As someone who has cared for the dying, I appreciate the honesty of Garner's story. I would call it a brave book, and a beautifully written one too.

Here's the podcast of her interview on The Book Show, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme:

Helen Garner, about The Spare Room

An Interview with Shih-Li Kow

From StarMag

A local author who was shortlisted on Monday for a prestigious international literary prize shares aspects of her writing life.

IN 2007, Silverfish Books published News from Home, a collection of short stories by three Malaysians, Chua Kok Yee, Rumaizah Abu Bakar, and Shih-Li Kow.

The writers were participants of the Silverfish Writing Programme, and had been chosen to contribute to the anthology because they showed promise and commitment. Each had a different style of storytelling, but Kow’s stories stood out as the most original and interesting, and also because her voice was the most confident and natural of the three.

A year later, Kow published Ripples and Other Stories, a collection of her own, to critical acclaim locally. On Monday, that acclaim became international when Ripples was shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The winner of the ‚35,000 (RM175,000) prize will be announced on Sept 30, at the culmination of the annual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, which begins on Sept 16.

The other titles shortlisted are An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower; Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy; Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw; and The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

In an e-mail interview, Kow, 40, talks about being shortlisted and other aspects of her life as a writer.

Man Comes Up Trumps

The winner of the IMPAC Dublin award is Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas.

Force of Habit

I love reading about nuns and convents - it must be something to do with the fact that I'm Catholic (lapsed) and attended a mission school from the age of six to 17.

Here is a list of books set in convents (schools as well as nunneries) that I've read and enjoyed:

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien

Frost in May by Antonia Frost

Quiet as a Nun (Jemima Shore Mysteries) by Antonia Fraser

New Habits by Isabel Losada (Non-fiction)

There's Something About a Convent Girl by Jackie Bennett And Rosemary Forgan (Non-fiction) 

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Find an opening

By DAPHNE LEE

WHEN I mentioned to a friend that I was writing an article about literary fiction, he asked, “Actually, what is literary fiction?” I immediately referred him to David Lubra’s Guide to Literary Fiction.

A Story to Move You

First published on 10th May, 2002 in StarTwo.

Review by DAPHNE LEE

ATONEMENT

By Ian McEwan

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 388

(ISBN: 978-0224062527)

Gentle Approach to Race Issues

Star Mag, 10th December 2006

Reading the Blues Away

I have been reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels about witches because I needed to be cheered up and they seemed to do the trick.

I came to the end of Lords and Ladies yesterday and now there are no more to look forward to. After I put it back on the shelf I re-read the last 1/4 of A Hat Full of Sky because Granny Weatherwax appears in that and when I first first read the book I'd never encountered her before. I was intrigued though ... and inspired. She is my hero. Every Discworld book about witches makes me admire her more.

Mini Review: Snakes & Earrings

I'm not very familiar with Japanese fiction having read only three or four books by Kazuo Ishiguro, but several friends swear by it, especially Haruki Murakami's novels.

Yesterday I started and finished a Japanese novella that made me think that it's about time I paid more attention to other writers from that country.

The book is Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara and it won her Japan's top literary prize (at age 20). It's about Lui, a Barbie-girl who meets Ama, a literally fork-tongued punk, and is introduced to the pleasures and pains of body piercing, tattooing and pervy sex via his tattoo-artist friend Shiba.

Shiba is a sadist and this suits self-destructive Lui just fine. Her inability to connect emotionally and honestly compels her to form near-anonymous and degrading relationships with these similar disenfranchised and emotionally bereft youths and from Shiba and the nipple-fixated Ama she gets an ample helping of agonising sex, which she faces and even solicits with an odd mixture of nonchalance and breathless anticipation.

Things get violent and sick, but personally speaking, I was too fascinated and to stop reading.

It's not written for teenagers but I can imagine teens being absolutely riveted by this book. Not only is it easy to read (the language is simple, stark and blunt yet vivid, evocative and forceful), it describes stuff that's thoroughly kinky and forbidden, thus endlessly, deliciously, compellingly appealing.

However, I'm not sure if I'd encourage my children (if they were teenagers) to read it. If they really wanted to I'd want a lot of discussion before and after. At very least the sex and violence, explicit as they are, are not at all gratuituos and that's much, much more than I can say of a lot of the coyly titillating rubbish on the Young Adult Fiction shelves these days.

Love Hurts

StarMag

Death of the heart

Review by DAPHNE LEE

THE LANDSCAPE OF LOVE

By Sally Beauman

Publisher: Little Brown

(ISBN:0316729434)