Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip - a tribute to Charles Dicken's Great Expectations set in the South Pacific - and the collected stories of 
Australian David Malouf were among the books nominated for the Kiriyama Prize, which aims to promote "greater understanding" of South Asia and the Pacific Rim, according to AP.
Other fiction nominees: Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef; Roma Tearne's Mosquito; and Zhu When's I Love Dollars. If that last one isn't a great title, I don't know what is.
Nonfiction nominees: Tom Bissell's The Father of All Things; East Wind Melts the Ice by Liza Dalby; India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha; Susan Mann's The Talented Women of the Zhang Family; and Julia Whitty's The Fragile Edge.
The winners of the 12th annual award will be announced April 1.
As usual, all the best books get overlooked. I refer to "Fred Yiggy Buys a Griddle" by the great Norwegian author Olaf Olaf; "The Great Big Book of Mosquito Bites" by Dr. Rufus Leaking; "The Mispeller's Bibel" by Ray D. Aider; "This Is An Issue That Goes to the Heart of Whether or Not This Country Will Finally Do the Right Thing and Other Boring Things I Have Said Over and Over" by Hillary Clinton; and "Random Acts of CapitalizioN" by Jerry Mander. These were all extremely worthy volumes that the so-called Kiriyama Prize has unfairly snubbed. Thank you for reading this pretend diatribe.
Posted by: Brett Bayne | February 27, 2008 at 01:50 PM