Shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010

The newly announced shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010 is:

*Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel (MacLehose Press), translated from the French by John Cullen.

*The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck (Harvill Secker), translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

*Fists by Pietro Grossi (Pushkin Press), translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis.

*Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou (Serpent’s Tail), translated from the French by Helen Stevenson.

*The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami (Arabia Books), translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

*Chowringhee by Sankar (Atlantic Books), translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha.

One intrepid blogger RobAroundBooks: is reading all of them ahead of the announcement of the winner and you can read more about that here.

You can view lots of literature in translation from ibooknet sellers here.

The Forbes Fictional Fifteen

The Forbes rich lists include the bizarre The Forbes Fictional 15. This is a list of the fifteen richest fictional characters:

"To qualify for the Fictional 15, we require that candidates be an authored fictional creation, a rule which excludes mythological and folkloric characters. They must star in a specific narrative work or series of works. And they must be known, both within their fictional universe and by their audience, for being rich.

Net worth estimates are based on an analysis of the fictional character's source material, and valued against known real-world commodity and share price movements. In the case of privately held fictional concerns, we sought to identify comparable fictional public companies. All prices are as of market close, April 12, 2010.

We reserve the right to bend or break any of our own rules--so yes, we know Uncle Sam and the Tooth Fairy are folkloric."

I rather love that the Tooth Fairy is on there despite obviously being real.

Topping this years Forbes Fictional 15 is Carlisle Cullen from the Twlight saga by Stephenie Meyer. Also on there is Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, and Artemis Fowl from the series by Eoin Colfer. but the others tend to be drawn from TV rather than literary fiction. You can see them all here.

The book shown illustrating this post is one of the Artenis Fowl series and this edition, signed by Eoin Colfer is from the stock of Stella & Rose's Books:

ARTEMIS FOWL THE ARCTIC INCIDENT
Published: Puffin Books., 2002
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardback , with Dustjacket
Inscription: Signed, Inscribed Or Annotated
1st, Black boards, silver title to spine., Book condition Fine, Dust jacket condition fine, SIGNED by author on title page.
Stock number: 582081. ISBN: 0670899631
£ 20.00 ( approx. $US 29.95 )

Pulitzer Prize winners 2010

The 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners include:

Fiction - Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

Poetry - Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)

The literary prizes which are for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, and for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American poet, have been awarded since 1948 and 1922 respectively.

Previous distinguished winners include:

Fiction:

1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

and poetry:

1924: New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes by Robert Frost
1947: Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell
1954: The Waking by Theodore Roethke
1963: Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams
1982: The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
2009: The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin

Book of the Week

Bill Badger's finest hour by B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford)

Published: Hamish Hamilton, 1961
Edition: First Edition; First Printing
Binding: Hardcover

Very clean, tightly bound book which has a small bookseller's label at the bottom of the front pastedown, in a bright priceclipped dustjacket which has minor rubbing at the corners but no tears or loss. An exceptional copy of one of the rarer B.B. childrens books, Very Good in Very Good dust jacket
Stock number: 25167.
£ 375.00

From the stock of Aucott & Thomas.

You can view more books illustrated by B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford) here.

They do it differently there

They do it differently there: a few musings on the similarities and differences across a corner of the English speaking world by Charlotte Robinson of the Amwell Book Company

In my innocence I imagined second hand bookshops the world over to be quite similar. After all I have sold books to a great variety of foreign dealers over the years, and we all speak roughly the same sort of language. Over the past few years I have made a several trips to Canada, the U S A and Australia and have been fascinated to observe the differences, as well as the familiarities.

My mother’s grandfather arrived in Western Australia in 1830 at the founding of the Colony but I was born to an English father and I did not visit until after she died in 2005. All through my life Australia was present – my father-in-law to be was very taken aback to discover he might be welcoming someone on the wrong side for the Ashes. A bit of teasing on my part, as I was not a follower of sport. We had regular visits from a range of cousins and family friends, who seemed much the same as us.

I was brought up on Australian nursery songs, childrens’ books and magazines from the school of the air. I took an interest and passed some of the favourites on to my children. I knew about the wild flowers and the animals. I had the Australian abiding fear of snakes. We had numerous water colours of the bush on the walls at home and I understood most of the Australian slang, having met much of it at home.

Arriving in Perth I was surprised at how familiar the landscape felt. Perth is reckoned to be the most remote city in the world, being 1,000 miles from its nearest neighbour. In area terms it is by far the largest state in Australia but much of it is desert and the majority of the population are concentrated in Perth and the south west.

Most people live in sprawling suburban areas made familiar by ‘Neighbours’. Life is surprisingly similar and familiar, especially if you have more cousins than you can count, most of whom have done the regulation visit to Europe at some point in their youth.

It is only when you travel in the countryside, ‘the bush’ that you begin to understand the enormity of the task, and the bravery and foolhardiness equal measure of the early settlers. An interest in my family history and wanting to offset some of travel costs naturally led me to investigate the second hand trade in Western Australia – which is different to the Eastern states.
Through my family connections I have seen some truly wonderful libraries, principly majoring on Australiana. Over the years I have sold books quite well in Western Australia. Before setting out I did an internet search for bookshops and found it very hard to find many. Here I mean serious bookshops, not remainder merchants or the ubiquitous book exchange.

As far as I can understand there are only two proper bookshops left if WA, with perhaps a third in Freemantle that I didn’t manage to visit. This feels like a worryingly small number for a such a large geographical area, but hey! Its lightly populated and most people are doing outdoors sort of things.

Robert Muir’s Bookshop in Nedlands near the University is a lovely shop in a typical late 19 century Australian suburban house. It resembled the sort of shop, once quite common but now only found in a few provincial towns in England, or Wigtown in Scotland.

My visit revealed my hither to parochial attitude to books in English. I knew of course that many books are published in America, Canada and Australia as well as other English speaking parts of the world. American first editions being the bane of English modern first dealers, because of the differing and complicated conventions their publishers use. I knew that American literature catalogues were often a bit boring because of the unfamiliar authors whose works just did not cross the pond effectively. As similarly the American trade would hoover up many British authors and look with disdain on others who didn’t travel.

All that did not prepare me for walking through rooms and rooms of books none of whose authors were remotely familiar. I have now repeated this experience in other parts of Australia, Canada and the United States. It still comes as a shock, but is in direct contrast to the bookshops at the airports in these countries which are now almost interchangeable in their offerings.

This wealth of publications more than anything else gave me the sense of just how long these countries have been building their own separate identities and literary histories, thus making the familiarities a bit deceiving, particularly in Australia and Canada. The United States experience of difference is more understandable because its inhabitants come from a much wider European and Central American pool. So often in Australia and Canada you find people have one or more British parents or grandparents.

Technically I am a fourth generation Australian, a fact brought home to me on this visit. When checking out the bookshops before leaving I had noticed an Australiana rarity being advertised on the side bar of the website. ‘My Dusky Friends’ by Ethel Hassell. The title was a bit off putting but the name was familiar and I checked the family tree – the same name as a Great Aunt of mine, from whom I had inherited a minute share in some property via an Aunt. I checked the dates and my Great Aunt and the author had to be one and the same. Not withstanding the title I emailed to order the book and pick it up in Perth.

Manuscript lodged in the Mitchell Library, Sydney 1910, used by anthropologists but not published in this form until 1975

Thus I made myself known to Mrs Muir at Robert Muir’s. She inquired my Mother’s name and on the strength of her family name, another cousin or two, we were adopted as de facto members of Perth society. So much so that when I enquired what bus we needed to catch to return home she swept us off and drove us home.

‘My Dusky Friends’ turned out to be an account of Ethel’s relationship with the local aborigines and observations on their customs during the first few years of her marriage. At the age of 21 in 1878 she went to live on a sheep station four days ride from Albany in far South, the only white woman for a hundred miles or more. It was a profitable enterprise for many years but the homestead was very crude and life must been extremely challenging for a young middle class Victorian girl.

Ethel Hassell, nee Clifton



Albert Hassell

Her descriptions might be judged as patronising today but they are sensitive and thoroughly sympathetic, whilst recognising the realities of life for a stone age people whose whole way of living was adapted to survival in the harshest of environments. Her description of this tribe is almost unique because it records life before it was changed for ever by the coming of the white man.

Great Aunt Ethel had four children while at Jarramungup, and took great advantage of the opportunity while living there to study the wild life and plant life. She assumed that any plants the aborgines could eat would be suitable to vary their tedious diet and experimented with mixed success. After eight years the family moved back to Albany where she went on to have ten children in all, the majority of whom survived to adulthood.




Jarramungup – in 1965, originally it had a thatched roof

Albany has an incredible deepwater harbour and was the main entry to the colony in the gold rush years but had been sidelined by developments further north by Aunt Ethel’s death in 1933. It lives on in its very beautiful location living mostly on tourists. Not a paradise for books though, with one book exchange to its name.

Which brings me full circle to the books. I managed to buy this one and several other useful pieces of Australiana but the pickings were fairly thin. I knew the books and the libraries existed because I had gazed enviously at those of various cousins and friends. They all said they picked them up in local sales. Mrs Muir finally explained that much to her irritation many of the most sort after books simply to not pass through her hands. It is the custom for the University to hold bi-annual fund raising sales of donated books……and this is where most the books go, and how they change hands.

I understand that this is unique to Western Australia, both Sydney and Melbourne have a more familiar approach to bookselling with shops (albeit often in basements) and a round of bookfairs. The number of shops is also reducing, as with elsewhere because of the internet. New books are much more expensive than in the UK and I imagine this is accounts for the ‘book exchange’, common in Australia but rarely found here.

My opportunities for further adventures in the Australian book trade are likely to limited in the near future partly because of the state of the pound and partly the need for the cash to go on visits to Los Angeles where my son and family now live.

You can view Charlotte's stock on ibooknet here and books on Australia here.

The Amwell Book Company specialise in architecture, art and photography.
books.

World Book Day

Well, not quite - that was apparently March 4th. The Times today have a voucher for World Book Day, which you can use to buy a book for yourself, and another to give away. To support this, they have a feature in which they've asked various of the great and good what book they'd buy, and what they'd give away.

I always have a brimming list of books I'd like to buy, but top at the moment is Horses and Soldiers: a Collection of Pictures Painted by the late Gilbert Holiday, edited by Lyndon Holden, and published privately by Gale & Polden of Aldershot in 1938. Sporting artist Gilbert Holiday died at the age of 58, having spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair after a hunting accident. His works are not as readily accessible as those of his contemporaries, such as Lionel Edwards: he illustrated relatively few books and many of his works were commissioned by the military. Neither did he issue many prints. As I don't have a copy of the great work, I can't actually illustrate this section with a picture of it, but here is a copy of something I do have, Moyra Charlton's Three White Stockings.

Gilbert Holiday was supreme at depicting the horse in motion: below is an plate from Moyra Charlton's Three White Stockings, one of the two books he illustrated for her.

Three White Stockings (Putnam 1933) and The Midnight Steeplechase (Putnam 1932) are the easiest ways to get hold of Gilbert Holiday's work: both are readily available.

As to what book I'd like to give, I have I suppose to do that rare thing and write about a book which is actually in print. I'd give Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I found entirely engrossing. It points up the fact that history is, to some extent, a matter of how you interpret it. Whilst the facts of what Thomas Cromwell did are (in general) not in question, his motivation of course is. Having grown up with the belief, strongly shoved along by Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, that Thomas More was all things good, I enjoyed reading Mantel's shading of his personality into something altogether more complex, and Cromwell's into something much warmer than the clever efficiency I have always admired.

If Wolf Hall had sold out, I'd go for Francis Palgrave's Golden Treasury: I usually have a book of poetry on the go: being a lark, I fall asleep early and fast and often the only thing I can manage to read (and I can't go to sleep before I've read something) is a poem. Palgrave's Golden Treasury was the first anthology of poems I read, as it was our standard school poetry textbook. I still think the book is a wonderful introduction to poetry, and was delighted to find out it is actually still in print. It has been added to over the years, and now features a post war section.

Book of the Week

110 YEARS OTFORD STATION 1882-1992
Published: 1992

Six b/w postcards of Otford Station in Kent. Contained in green and white envelope., Book condition Fine, C/w
Stock number: 811313.
£ 10.00 ( approx. $US 16.37 )

From the stock of Stella & Rose's Books.

You can view more books on Kent here.