Retellings of novels like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield help to keep the canon aliveIt might have lost out at the Booker, but James, a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett, was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction. Everett retells Mark Twain’s 1884 picaresque novel about a 13-year-old boy’s escapades on the Mississippi from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Shocking, gripping and surprisingly comic, it’s a bravura performance that celebrates and subverts the original.Its success follows that of last year’s Women’s prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a dazzling 550-page updating of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield transported to the author’s home region of Appalachia during the 1990s opioid epidemic. As the supreme chronicler of social injustice, Dickens provided Kingsolver with “a masterclass” in how to use narrative to make readers care about a latter-day underclass.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2024-12-30 18:25:43 UTC ]
Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Mon, 14/11/2011 - 08:15 Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English (Bloomsbury) has made the shortlist of the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award, equaling its achievement on the Man Booker Prize this year, with Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-11-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Caroline Horn Publication Date: Fri, 11/11/2011 - 07:30 Return to Ribblestrop by Andy Mulligan (Simon & Schuster Children's Books) has been awarded the Guardian Children's Book Award, beating off shortlisted titles including David Almond's My Name is Mina and Simon Mason's Moon... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-11-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Katie Allen Publication Date: Wed, 19/10/2011 - 14:45 Sarah Winmans debut When God Was a Rabbit (Headline Review) has won the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festivals Newton First Book Award. The award encourages attendees of the festival to vote for their favourite of the 47... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Katie Allen Publication Date: Wed, 25/05/2011 - 09:20 Two titles picked for BBC2s "Culture Show" special on debut novelists, broadcast in March, have made it to the shortlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011. Ned Beaumans Boxer Beetle (Sceptre), also shortlisted for the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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