How the Irish saved civilization, or at least literature

Now that's what I call a literary award: $155,000. And it goes to Beirut-born Rawi Hage, recipient of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for his debut novel De Niro's Game. Amazingly enough, the award is run by the Dublin Public Library system, according to AP, though it's financed by a Connecticut-based management consultancy.

Hage beat out Yasmina Khadra (The Attack); Sayed Kashua (Let It Be Morning); Andrei Makine (The Woman Who Waited); Yasmine Gooneratne (The Sweet & Simple Kind); Gail Jones (Dreams of Speaking); Javier Cercas (The Speed of Light) and Patrick McCabe (Winterwood).

Here's what Herald reviewer Rayyan Al-Shawaf, who lives in Beirut, had to say about the novel:

Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Canada, De Niro's Game does for Christian East Beirut what Ziad Doueiri's much-acclaimed film West Beirut did for the predominantly Muslim half of the Lebanese capital. Narrator Bassam and his best friend George -- nicknamed "De Niro" -- were kids when the war erupted and have seemingly grown inured to its effects. Most of their neighbors, however, remain foolishly preoccupied with dodging death. Hage eerily conjures up the paralytic terror experienced by densely populated neighborhoods when pummeled by indiscriminate shelling: "There was that silence, that quietness before bombs fall and teeth chatter and kids piss in their older brothers' shorts, and young girls menstruate before their time, and windows shatter, and glass slices our dark flesh wide open."

Increasingly, Bassam and George view the war as a means to make money. They concoct a scheme to siphon off funds from a militia-run casino where George works. This proves lucrative, but soon George joins the militia and is drawn into mindless violence. While George sinks ever deeper, Bassam contemplates emigration and eventually makes his way to France. The final third of the novel features a pretentious mix of fantasy and existential philosophizing -- Bassam borrows Camus' L'tranger from an Algerian hotel clerk in Paris -- and generally proves a disappointment.

Though a number of Arabic words and expressions are incorrectly rendered, Hage skillfully evokes the contradictions of Lebanese culture and the madness of wartime Beirut through arresting visual imagery and a sensitive probing of communal sentiment. Haunting descriptions of Armenians who survived the 1915 Turkish massacres and found refuge in Lebanon, passing references to neighborhoods populated by Syriacs and one character's stark reminder that Christians in Lebanon should remain vigilant lest they end up like their counterparts in Egypt all provide readers with a glimpse into the siege mentality of East Beirut.

Praise for paperbacks

Quality Paperback Book has named its 2007 winners of the New Voices and New Visions awards: New Voices goes to filmmaker Miranda July for her quirky short story collection Nobody Belongs Here More than You. New Visions goes to Ishmael Beah for A Long Way Gone, his memoir about being a child soldier in Africa.

I reviewed both books and liked them both, though I will say July's narrators all tend to sound alike, so if you value diversity in a story collection, this may not be for you.

Last year's winners were Marissa Pessl for her debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Joan Didion for her memoir The Year of Magical  Thinking. Winners earn a $5,000 cash prize.

Rose wins Orange

Rose Tremain's The Road Home won Britain's Orange Prize, awarded to fiction by women. The book, about an Eastern European migrant in London, is Tremain's 10th novel, and it comes out in the U.S. in August.

Tremain gets $60,000, a bronze statue by artist Grizel Niven and bragging rights for a year.

Margins award winners

PEN American Center President Francine Prose has announced the winners of the Beyond Margins awards for writers of color. The winners: Chris Abani, Song for Night (pictured here); Amiri Baraka, Tales of the Out and the Gone; Frances Hwang Transparency; Naemm Murr's The Perfect Man; Joseph M. Marshall III, The Day the World Ended at Little Big Horn.

Abani and Baraka appeared at last fall's Miami Book Fair International.

Vote for the best of the Booker Prize

You know how you're always cranky over the books that win awards? Well, now you can have a say, even though you are not an Important Literary Critic. Voting is open for The Best of the Booker (i.e., best of the Man Booker Prize) as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the award.

Choose your favorite among six choices agreed upon by a panel, chosen from 41 Booker winners: Pat Barker's The Ghost Road; Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda; JM Coetzee's Disgrace; JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur; Nadine Gordimer's The Conversationalist; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

Hmmm. I don't see The English Patient on that list. I may have to boycott.

According to the Man Booker website, looks like Rushdie is the odds-on favorite to win.

Click here for more information on voting.

John Hart wins the Edgar

John Hart's Down River won the Edgar Award for best mystery novel Thursday night, according to the Mystery Writers of America blog, beating out Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, Ken Bruen's Priest and Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman.

Other winners include:

Best first novel: In the Woods, Tana French.

Best paperback original: Queenpin, Megan Abbott.

Best short story: The Golden Gopher, Susan Straight.

Click here for a full list of winners.

Orange you glad she's nominated?

American Patricia Wood, author of the debut novel Lottery (due out in paperback in June), is one of six authors on the shortlist for the Orange Prize for fiction by women. You think that's lucky? Wood was inspired by her father's winnings in the Washington State lottery (six million bucks).

Two other debuts were nominated: Britain's Sadie Jones for The Outcast and Canadian Heather O'Neill for Lullabies for Little Criminals. Rounding out the nominees are Canadian Nancy Huston for Fault Lines; and Brits Charlotte Mendelson for When We Were Bad and Rose Tremain for The Road Home.

The winner will be announced June 4. Past winners you may have heard of: Carol Shields, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith.

In case you missed it...

...and I'm sure you did, since it's impossible to find book stories on our fabulous website: click here to read my Pulitzer reaction story.

Another interesting tidbit that didn't make it into the paper: Tracy Letts won the drama prize for August: Osage County. He's the son of novelist Billie Letts, who wrote the Wal-Mart drama Where the Face Heart Is. You may recall the movie with Natalie Portman. Billie has a new novel out this summer, Made in the U.S.A., which takes place in a town called Spearfish, South Dakota. Or is it North Dakota? I can never tell those states apart.

No fuku here

The fuku - that's an ominous sense of doom to you - that trails his hero's family must have skipped Junot Diaz. On Monday the Dominican-born author won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Diaz published his previous book 11 years ago. I think we can say this one was worth the wait.

For a list of other Pulitzer winners, click here.

Local hero makes good - again

The National Book Critics Circle, of which I am still not a member, named Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying 2007's Book of the Year in the Autobiography category. The memoir, about Miami resident Danticat's father and uncle, was a National Book Award finalist.

During her acceptance speech, the Haitian-born Danticat thanked the other writers in the Autobiography category for allowing her to "visit" there. Looks like she's headed back to the world of fiction to add to her already impressiv collection: The Dew Breaker; Krik? Krak!; Breath, Eyes, Memory; and The Farming of Bones.

The NBCC named Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as its 2007 winner for fiction. For a list of all the winners and nominees, click here.

Who else is getting an award this week?

Looks like it's Jim Shepard. AP reports that he won the Story Prize (for short fiction)  this year.

Shepard won for his collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway. Jim is presumably happy that he won the award, but it sure doesn't pay like the Alfaguara prize, which comes with a payday of $175,000. This one pays a measly $20,000. Of course, he would have had to write Like You'd Understand, Anyway, in Spanish, so that might've been a problem.

Pip pip hooray

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.

Now that's a prize

Cuban-born writer Antonio Orlando Rodriguez, who now lives in the U.S., has won the prestigious Alfaguara Spanish literary prize for his novel Chiquita, the Associated Press reports.

The prize money: A whopping $175,000. The story: It's about a Cuban singer and dancer and is set at the beginning of the 20th century. No word on when an English translation is expected.

My telltale heart beats for suspense

Reading the new Peter Robinson book Friend of the Devil got me to thinking: What suspense novels were nominated for an Edgar Award this year?

Here's the list: Priest, Ken Bruen; Christine Falls, Benjamin Black; The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon; Soul Patch by Reed Farrell Coleman; and Down River, John Hart.

I've read two of them, the Chabon, which I loved, and Priest, the fourth in Bruen's Jack Taylor series, which was also good. Bruen cuts through all the blarney about the magic and beauty of Ireland and drags you right down into the ugly, muddy soul of Galway. If you like your suspense hard-boiled and noir, light on procedural antics, he's worth a look.

Benjamin Black is the pseudonym of Irish writer John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea; Christine Falls is the first book under the Black name. I've heard good things about Down River - Olive Cogdill of the S-S named it one of her best mysteries of the year - but Soul Patch I've never heard of. Clearly I need to get cracking.

The Edgars - named after that nice fella Poe up above - will be announced on May 1. For a glimpse of the other categories, click here.

What a prize!

Lucette Lagnado, author of the searing memoir The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, has won the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The prize - $100,000 - is given out by the Jewish Book Council and is the largest monetary prize in the Jewish literary world.

Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, wrote eloquently about her family's exodus from Cairo to New York, exposing an untold story of almost a million Jewish refugees forced to leave their homes and striking a chord with readers across the world.