American author Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International Prize. The award, presented in London, comes with a sizable $90,000 monetary prize.

The award is awarded biannually to authors who write in English or have translations in English readily available. This marks the fourth time an English-language author has won the international award. Previous winners include Philip Roth, Alice Munro, and Chinua Achebe.

Lydia Davis is best known for her short stories, which can range from nine pages long to a couple sentences. “Companions,” for example, reads in its entirety:

“We are sitting together, my digestion and I. I am reading a book and it is working away at the lunch I ate a little while ago.”

To date, she has written only one novel, The End of the Story, published in 2004.

Sir Christopher Ricks, the chair of the judging panel, told audience members, “Lydia Davis’ writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorize them?” He continued, “Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?”

He went on to say, “there is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention. Vigilance as how to realize things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody’s impure motives and illusions of feeling.”

Her two most recent works of fiction are a chapbook entitled Cows, published in 2011, and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a mammoth tome published in 2009. In addition to fiction, Davis has also translated French literature, including classics like Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, among others.

Among the other nominees, only Marilynne Robinson has made the shortlist before. Other authors in the running included Yan Lianke, Peter Stamm, Vladimir Sorokin, and Marie NDiaye.

In 2011, the Man Booker international Prize was controversially given to Philip Roth, resulting in one of the judges resigning. According to feminist Carmen Callil, the judge in question, “[Roth] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.

“I don’t rate him as a writer at all,” Callil continued. “I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire—all the others were fine.”

So far Davis seems safe from such accusations. Her next book of short stories, Can’t and Won’t is due out in the United States in 2014.

Image credit: Seattle Arts and Lectures via Flickr

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Bestselling author Jennifer Crusie claims she was born to write novels rather than short stories, but her newly-released collection of short stories, Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories, proves that she is a versatile writer. The Ohio native has written 16 books, and over thirty of her essays have been published in magazines and anthologies. Crusie originally compiled this collection for her MFA in fiction at Ohio State University.

Anyone who has read her book Crazy for You, will recognize characters such as Quinn and her best friend Darla. Crusie first wrote about Quinn and Darla here, and they helped her develop the subsequent novel, which was one of the top ten romances of 1999 as selected by Romance Writers of America.

The collection is unique in that you get to follow Crusie’s writing process. Crusie illustrates the development of her characters through notes at the beginning and end of each story, providing readers with an insider’s look into what Crusie was thinking when she wrote them.

The voices of the different stories vary from pre-teens struggling with adolescent love and family drama to a grown woman whose husband has left her for the ‘Bank Slut.’ The characters vary in age and personality, but they feel realistic as they tell their stories.

The stories share a common theme: love. But the stories are not the typical romance stories that Crusie is famous for. Crusie covers all the different types of love, from one-sided love, to true romance, to love between family members.

The book starts out with a story entitled, “The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course.” Told by the fifteen-year-old version of Quinn, this story rambles on in an honest, funny way. Quinn notices everything about her attention-hogging older sister’s love life, and she tries to give the mailman tips on how to date her. Crusie says many of her fans do not recognize the narrator as Quinn in this story, but she reminds the reader that this story occurred seventeen years before Crazy for You.

“I Am At My Sister’s Wedding”, includes characters who got cut from the published version of Crazy for You. Written from the point of view of Caroline, the story follows her as she attends her older sister Stephanie’s multiple weddings. The story begins when Caroline is fifteen and continues over the next thirty years as Caroline attends five weddings. The two sisters seem to be polar opposites: while Caroline never settles down, Stephanie has settled down too many times to count. But in the end they have more in common than what appears—they both struggle to find that perfect guy. Caroline describes each wedding in vivid detail, from the crazy relatives in attendance to how the color of the punch had to match the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses.

Crusie tells us in the note before the story that the story was originally intended to be a way to learn more about Stephanie as a character. In the first drafts of Crazy for You, she was one of Quinn’s best friends. But Crusie realized the story was less about Stephanie and more about Caroline—who Crusie describes as having a “wacked-out view of men and relationships.” Crusie states that Stephanie was such a simple character that it was easy to cut her from the book.

“Just Wanted You to Know” takes the form of a letter written by Debbie, Darla’s sister, to her cheating husband. As the letter progresses, the reader sees Debbie go through the different phases of dealing with her cheating husband. In the beginning of the letter, Debbie is in denial that her husband has left her for a woman known locally as the ‘Bank Slut.’ Once she accepts the truth, she is still willing to forgive her husband, but throughout the story Debbie continuously changes her mind. Although written as a letter, it reads more like a diary. Debbie pours her emotion into the note, making it a form of therapy. She vents all her thoughts of the affair, the divorce, and even the problems it is causing with her nosy mother. The letter is complete with several postscripts in which Debbie’s feelings evolve, from thinking she can forgive her husband as she explains her plans to win him back, to her affair with her husband’s best friend.

The collection also contains appendices, which provide alternative versions of some of the stories. For example, “The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away with It, Of Course” was first written for a seminar with short story and novel writer, Ron Carlson. For one assignment, he required his students to write a 26-sentence story, and the first sentence had to start with the letter A, the next with B, etc. Although a difficult and unusual assignment, Crusie was pleased with the outcome and expanded the story into the version you see published in her collection. Crusie included the original exercise in Appendix A, and it is interesting to see the transformations that took place.

Readers can also read the published first chapter of Crazy for You and the original chapter from the book proposal. Although the two chapters are similar in content, some characters were deleted and some details changed as Crusie’s ideas for Crazy for You developed.

Even though most of us cannot say that our sister shot the mailman, the stories are all very easy to relate to. Crusie’s writing is easy to follow and fun to read. Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories is available for Kindle, Nook, and iBook. A print version will be available soon.

Rating: 4/5

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With the announcement of the winner of the Pulitzer Prize rapidly approaching,  the Toonari Post has begun speculating who will come home with the prize. Another website has put up their own list of predictions, and Toonari Post is reviewing seven of them to judge their likelihood of winning.

Two short story collections seem to have a good chance at getting the prize: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman.

Don DeLillo, more than any other author on the list, has received critical recognition. Literary Critic Harold Bloom said,” he is one of four current American authors to have touched the sublime” (the others being Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon.) Despite this, he still has not won a Pulitzer prize for his work.

The Angel Esmeralda consists of nine stories written from 1979 to 2011. Though some are much better than others, all are memorable thanks to DeLillo’s masterful prose. The settings stretch across the world, from New York to a high security prison in the Canary Islands, from Greece to outer space; however; there is one unifying theme throughout all of them: communication. It may take different forms in all of the stories, but an examination of how people pass thoughts and ideas from one another is always present.

Some of the earlier stories come off as a bit weak as the later ones seem like they were meant for critical analysis rather than pleasure reading, but the middle ones are amazing. The title story is almost unreal, and it is worth picking up the book based on that alone.

DeLillo is incredible with prose, and it shows.

“The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She’d been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.”

DeLillo has had a shot at the Pulitzer before with other nominated novels and this time around he has potential to add to his awards collection.

In contrast, Edith Pearlman is a small, lesser-known novelist, writing only short stories that have only made a small splash—until now. Binocular Vision won the National Book Critics Circle award last March and is currently ranked #1 on PPrize.com as ‘most likely to win’ the award. The book is split into two parts: the first consisting of selected stories previously published and the second being made up of new narratives. Pearlman’s prose at times reads bizarrely, but from the beginning onward is very effective:

“The town square was a bare knoll. A church faced the square. Its stucco walls seemed to be unraveling. The one-storied inn sagged towards its own courtyard. Robert was shown to a rear bedroom. From his window he could see oxen.”

Some of the stories are weak and forgettable, while others are strong. Though the book is excellent and is definitely in the running for the Pulitzer, it suffers from two problems. First, Pearlman has the uncanny ability to make even the most fantastic location seem banal, rendering what should be exciting stories into dull excursions.

Second, often the stories only come together and are worthwhile in the end, which at times works, but other times makes you wonder why you are even reading the story, and if the ending is messy or poor, the whole story comes off as unsatisfactory. While not all too many stories fall into this last category, enough do that the book at times seems disappointing.

Though the book itself is worth reading and definitely deserves the accolades it has already received, it does not exactly come across as Pulitzer material.

Stay tuned for the last installment of Pulitzer Prize speculation, as the Toonari Post takes a look at some of the novels nominated for the award.

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