More 2009 Fiction Previews

The Guardian takes its shot at 2009 fiction, using a month-by-month approach that goes up through June. Lots of information to sift through here, including the next stop of the Bolano juggernaut:

Who'd have thought it: the most hotly anticipated novel of the new year is a 900-page posthumously published unfinished epic from a Latin American author. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (Picador) is a visionary exploration of life and literature, arranged in five independent sections which take in an obscure German novelist, a mad Mexican professor, an American sportswriter and the brutal murders of female factory workers on the Mexican border. It was heralded as a masterpiece on its publication in Spanish in 2004, and excitement has been building ever since.

I hope the UK manages to be a little less fawning in its coverage than the U.S. was.

This article is a little more heavy on the translations/international fiction than the one from The Guardian that I read last week. It mentions a couple of intriguing books from African authors:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows Half of A Yellow Sun with short stories that straddle Nigeria and the west in The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate), while there's an exciting debut collection from a new Zimbabwean author, Pettina Gappah; An Elegy for Easterly (Faber) explores the effect on ordinary life of Mugabe's regime.

Also, there's a date for the UK publication of Orhan Pamuk's newest novel, although there's no sign of it anywhere on Amazon's U.S. site, making me wonder if anyone plans to publish it on these shores"

October sees Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence (Faber), a love story set across the class divide which is already his bestselling book in his native Turkey.

Comments

[mattbucher]

"a little less fawning"? What does that mean? I would bet that if the book had be criticized heavily or ignored, bloggers would be writing about how out of it the mainstream media is. If the book is roundly praised then the media is fawning? I don't get it.