American literature is going through quite a bit of trouble right now. difficult period. Even so: American literature is worried now. She worries that for several years now she has discovered in herself a shameful lack of voices other than the voice of a cisgender white man and a cisgender white housewife, and, of course, is looking for something to fill this lack. The #weneeddiversebooks book campaign is only in its third year, but things have already made significant progress. dead center. For example, the black writer Paul Batey received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel The Sellout. Centaurs. The same award this year was given to the luxurious Louise Eldritch, who, along with Sherman Alexie, holds a flimsy literary defense for all Native Americans (Alexie for the Spokane Indians, Eldritch for the Ojibwe). The American writer of Vietnamese origin, Viet Tan Vinh, received the Pulitzer Prize for unraveling Vietnam War on the other side - you know, a voice from under a band-aid.
In general, little by little other voices began to be heard from bookstores. However, since all this is still beginning, mixing and emerging, so far, books in the form of a cry have worked best for BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) authors. We will leave all sorts of nuances, subtleties and hidden lyricism to the fat times, but for now: “- How many swords do we have?! - And we have Pitchforks!” - that's what it is summary many books that are now becoming important to American literature.
So, Colson Whitehead’s novel took its reader not with the complexity of the novel’s internal structure, but literally with a pitchfork. The story is very simple, and if you have read Gulliver's Travels, you will find it even simpler. Slave Cora escapes from a plantation where an evil master roasted slaves and hung them in cages to discourage others. Cora manages to escape using the underground railroad, which in Whitehead's novel becomes a real underground road, with rails, cars and stops. Cora and her escape partner, Caesar, face many misadventures, from the scary to the Swiftian absurd. Using their example, Whitehead will talk about many important milestones in the history of American slavery and subsequent segregation, including, for example, the Tuskegee experiment - a study of syphilis that was carried out on the poor African-American population without their knowledge.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of this book, but one cannot help but admit that in “The Underground Railroad,” for all its straightforwardness and simplicity, there is hidden a huge, burning feeling of rage, which is the locomotive that pulled the novel to a huge number of prizes and awards. , from the Pulitzer to the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best fantasy novel. The book can be simple and cardboard in places, it can be uncomplicated and similar to propaganda poster, but if there is even a drop of real feeling in it, it will live and attract readers. In Whitehead's novel there is a whole sea of this real feeling, and if you live with Cora until the very end of her journey, then in the finale this sea literally splashes out at your feet, and you understand that all this was not read in vain, even if only for the sake of the last two pages.
A young, diligent slave, Cora, works on Mr. Ridgway's plantation. It's not so much that bothers her physical labor, how much longing there is for Mabel’s runaway mother and the rude attitude towards her from the owner and other slaves. Soon the girl learns that the mother wanted to take her daughter, but died on the way back from a snake bite. Cora's friend Caesar suggests running away. They are hiding in an underground labyrinth railway tracks escaping from pursuit. The heroes find refuge in South Carolina, where there is a slave protection program subject to consent to sterilization in exchange for participation in an experiment to track the spread of syphilis. Caesar dies at the hands of an angry mob, Cora escapes to the railroad, where station operator Martin finds her and hides her in his attic. But even here Ridgway finds her to return her to work. On the way back, she is freed by other runaway slaves. She's now heading to Indiana to a black man's farm free citizen Valentine. Cora plans an affair with her savior Royal, but childhood memories of rape prevent her from having an affair. What awaits the heroine?
The Pulitzer Prize is one of the few awards among whose laureates one can hardly find a passable author or work. It is divided into two blocks - journalistic and humanitarian, within which the best is celebrated piece of art, drama, history book, biography, poetic work and non-fiction.
Moreover, only citizens of the United States can apply for the Pulitzer Prize in Literature (except for the nomination “For a book on US history”).
Main prize for fiction novel this year received New York writer Colson Whitehead for his book “Underground Railway” (“The Underground Railroad”), which has already hit the New York Times bestseller list and won the US National Book Award.
In America, the novel sold more than 825 thousand copies, and Barry Jenkins, director of the film Moonlight, said he would make a series based on it for Amazon. So Whitehead's victory was quite predictable.
The novel takes place on the eve Civil War in USA. In the story, the dark-skinned slave Cora, having become an outcast even among her own people, decides to escape and ends up on the underground railroad, with the help of which slaves from the southern slaveholding states moved to the free North.
Cora kills along the way white boy, who tries to stop her, and the hunt begins for her.
English-language criticism has already noted Whitehead's book for its combination of dashingly twisted adventurous plot with its truthful portrayal of American slavery, and for making the narrative of a brutal past surprisingly relevant to today. She was recommended by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club and Barack Obama.
Colson Whitehead was already a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with The Days of John Henry, another polyphonic novel in which the construction of railroads becomes the plot of a sharply social plot. He is the author of such bestsellers as “Zone One,” “The Intuitionist,” and others. However, his books have not yet been published in Russian.
Whitehead's "Underground Railroad" is being developed in Russia by the publishing house Corpus, which has promised to publish the book by the end of 2017.
Among the authors of dramatic works, Lynn Nottage was noted for her play “Sweat”. She had previously won a Pulitzer for her play Ruined. Her play about steelworkers stuck in a factory premiered on Broadway on March 4, 2017. Heather Ann Thompson won the prize for her history book, with the jury highlighting her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy", dedicated to one of the most significant events of the prisoner's rights movement in America.
The best biography was awarded to the family chronicle “The Return” by Hisham Matar, a Libyan writer who returned to his homeland 30 years later in 2012 after the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. Hisham's debut novel (In the Country of Men) was already nominated for the Booker Prize in 2006. Of the poets this year, the collection "Olio" was awarded to Tyhimba Jess, a poet exploring the songs of African-American performers who performed during the Civil War and World War I, whose work has not been preserved in history. in writing. The best non-fiction of the year is the book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in American city"("Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City") by sociologist Matthew Desmond on the relationship between the poorest American families with landlords.
The prize in the field of international journalism went to the staff The newspapers New York Times for materials on Vladimir Putin's dissemination activities Russian influence abroad.
In the field of "explanatory" journalism - to journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for their materials on the "Panamanian archives".
Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in different time became John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, John Updike and others. Last year, the main prize was taken by the novel “The Sympathizer,” the debut book American author Vietnamese-born Viet Tan Nguyen about the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975, told from the perspective of a political prisoner.
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded annually since 1917. The winners receive $10 thousand. The award ceremony will take place in May at the traditional gala dinner at the Columbia University library.
Gorky begins publishing materials on the long list of the British Booker. In the first issue, Anastasia Zavozova examines the novels of Colson Whitehead, Mohsin Hamid and Ali Smith.
Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad / Underground Railroad
(will be published by Corpus publishing house at the beginning of 2018, translated by O. Novitskaya)
American literature is currently going through a rather difficult period. Even so: American literature is now experiencing. She worries that for several years now she has discovered in herself a shameful lack of voices other than the voice of a cisgender white man and a cisgender white housewife, and, of course, is looking for something to fill this lack. The #weneeddiversebooks book campaign is only in its third year, but things have already made significant progress. For example, the black writer Paul Batey received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel The Sellout. Centaurs. The same award this year was given to the luxurious Louise Eldritch, who, along with Sherman Alexie, holds a flimsy literary defense for all Native Americans (Alexie for the Spokane Indians, Eldritch for the Ojibwe). The American writer of Vietnamese origin, Viet Thanh Vinh, who unearthed the Vietnam War from the other side, received the Pulitzer Prize - such, you know, a voice from under a band-aid.
In general, other voices from bookstores began to be heard little by little. However, since all this is still beginning, mixing and emerging, so far, books in the form of a cry have worked best for BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) authors. We will leave all sorts of nuances, subtleties and hidden lyricism to the fat times, but for now: “- How many swords do we have?! - And we have Pitchforks!” - such is the summary of many books that are now becoming important for American literature.
So, Colson Whitehead’s novel took its reader not with the complexity of the novel’s internal structure, but literally with a pitchfork. The story is very simple, and if you have read Gulliver's Travels, you will find it even simpler. Slave Cora escapes from a plantation where an evil master roasted slaves and hung them in cages to discourage others. Cora manages to escape using the Underground Railroad, which in Whitehead's novel becomes a real underground road, with rails, cars and stops. Cora and her escape partner, Caesar, face many misadventures, from the scary to the Swiftian absurd. Using their example, Whitehead will talk about many important milestones in the history of American slavery and further segregation, including, for example, the Tuskegee experiment - a study of syphilis that was carried out on the poor African-American population without their knowledge.
To be honest, I am not a fan of this book, but one cannot help but admit that in “The Underground Railroad,” for all its straightforwardness and simplicity, there is hidden a huge, burning feeling of rage, which is the locomotive that pulled the novel to a huge number of prizes and awards. , from the Pulitzer to the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. A book can be simple and cardboard in places, it can be uncomplicated and look like a propaganda poster, but if it has even a drop of real feeling, it will live and attract readers. In Whitehead's novel there is a whole sea of this real feeling, and if you live with Cora until the very end of her journey, then in the finale this sea literally splashes out at your feet, and you understand that all this was not read in vain, even if only for the sake of the last two pages.
Mohsin Hamid
Exit West
And here is another very real contender for this year’s Booker Prize (the first is, of course, Whitehead, who has already collected so many awards that the Booker might be given to him by inertia.) Mohsin Hamid is very famous in Britain, but not only in Britain, writer. Based on his novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, which, by the way, deserves the Booker much more than the current novel, Golden Lion winner Mira Nair even made a film of the same name and quite worthy. Before Western Exit, Hamid worked roughly in the same vein as Aravind Adiga and Vikas Swarup: he showed the English-speaking reader the real Pakistan literally in person. His novels always featured the most incredible characters: from a rich poor man who made a fortune selling water to Lahore's community of thieves. In general, this was by no means a golden and drowsy Asia, but loud, bustling and real, described with the right proportions of humor and despair.
In his new novel, Western Exit, Hamid raised important topic- the problem of refugees in Europe and the USA. But, how can I put it, I picked it up and immediately dropped it. Because, for all the enormity and importance of the themes it touches on, the novel itself seems not so much a novel, but a sketch, a prelude to a novel. The narrative rushes from point A to point B, and ends up either in Bologoe or in Popovka. Nadia and Sayid meet each other in an unnamed South Asian city that is slowly but surely being taken over by military rebels. Everything around is dying and collapsing, not sobbingly, but terribly banal: no light, no batteries, no Internet, life is slowly being tightened in a knot around the neck, and in the midst of all this, Nadiya and Said love each other.
But here the novel takes a somersault and becomes sci-fi. All over the world, black doors are opening that lead to other countries. They are found, they try to close and guard them, but the doors continue to open. Through them you can move around the globe without visas or passports; the doors literally break the concept of borders.
Through such a door, Said and Nadiya flee the war, first to London and then to the USA. Their life is difficult, and their love is tested. End. For the sake of volume, several insert short stories are squeezed into the novel about other people who discovered the same doors, and behind them - well, for example, happiness and love, which some did not have even in very prosperous Amsterdam. But that's basically it.
From the novel as a whole one is left with the feeling that everything started very well, but never ended, hanging somewhere between banality and embryo great novel, literally his skeleton, in which, unfortunately, what the author wanted to say is too clearly visible. All important words- about boundaries, about how being cut off from one’s roots changes not only a person, but any existing relationship chemical level, that war is bad, that good people is everywhere, even if they are not like us/you - all this is spelled out so clearly that you involuntarily begin to look for some kind of second bottom in the novel, a lining of thinner meaning, of a qualitatively different pain. And you don’t find it. "Western exit" is the one rare case, when you want not to cut the novel, but to add to it, to inflate it, so that everything that was sketched in broad strokes acquires at least some halftones and depth. Although, who knows, maybe the “Western Exit” is, if not a pitchfork, then a rake, over which it would be useful for someone to stumble, but simple truths, as we know, hit more noticeably.
Ali Smith
Autumn / Autumn
Before I read Autumn, I wanted Sebastian Barry to win the Booker with his unexpected plot novel"Endless Days" But now it seems to me that the fairest outcome of the current Booker will be a victory for Ali Smith, because in this case the award will go to something very - I can’t find another word - fresh. Against the backdrop of a bunch of identical books, as if collected at Ikea for writers, Smith's novels seem incredibly authentic - precisely because they are unlike anything else at all. Everything she writes looks like some kind of release of words and punctuation marks into the atmosphere: pages are not formatted, commas are lying around, phrases begin but do not always end. This is why starting to read Ali Smith can be difficult, but not because she writes difficultly. Quite the opposite: when you get used to the fact that she can make an airplane out of any sentence, you begin to see the incredible, clear beauty of her words - it is no coincidence that her style is called “Keatsian.” Here, inside, behind the run of words in different sides, the beauty of clean lines, harmony and lots and lots of color is hidden.
"Autumn" is the first of four so-called "seasonal" novels by Smith. She plans to write three more novels: “Spring”, “Summer” and “Winter”, of course - about how time passes and how we live it, changing with it. Unexpectedly, the novel has a plot. Moreover, instead of beautifully spreading words in all directions (and Smith can do this so perfectly that no one expects anything more from her), she crams so much information into the 264 pages of the novel that some clever Franzen could I wish I could mold just as much out of this at once.
“Autumn” is not only a story about how a country that used to be part of the European Union is withering and shrinking, but now has packed up its things and frowned. First, this is the story of Daniel and Elizabeth, who love each other as only two people can love each other: souls entangled, despite the fact that Elizabeth is 32 and Daniel is 101, and he lies semi-coma in a nursing home. One branch the plot is on behind them, behind their acquaintance when Elizabeth was only eleven, and behind that - this is where the “secondly” begins - how Daniel instilled in Elizabeth a love of art and told her about the founder of British pop art, Pauline Boty. Daniel's childhood, Elizabeth's childhood, Daniel's relationship with his sister and Elizabeth's relationship with her mother, trying to get a new passport and write a dissertation, reading Dickens and reading Huxley in the white silence of a nursing home, October - the blink of an eye - and even the Profumo affair. In “Autumn” there was a place for everything, but at the same time in the novel there is no feeling that ideas are pushing you from all sides and not allowing you to breathe. There is so much air here that it becomes clear why Smith juggles words so much, sometimes pushing them apart on paper, or even tearing them apart - so that, in general, the reader has room to breathe.
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24.11.16 10:30
Every year, the largest book retailer Amazon makes... New Year This is a kind of gift from its reader and represents the rating of the best books of the outgoing year.
Last year's 2015 bestsellers included: Paula Hawkins' detective story "The Girl on the Train", a novel about family life“Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff and the book “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which talks about how difficult it is to live as an African-American in modern America.
This year's selection impresses with its subject diversity and high degree dramatic. So, the most interesting and worth reading books of 2016.
"The Underground Railroad" Colson Whitehead
Bestseller by versions of The New York Times National Finalist Book Prize USA Colson Whitehead.
main character- young slave Cora, working on the cotton plantations of the slave state of Georgia. Life here is a daily hell for each of the slaves, but Kora is especially hard. A stranger even among “her own people,” she meets Caesar, a slave from Virginia. The young man tells her about the Underground Railroad, after which they decide to run away together. But everything, of course, does not go as planned: Cora kills the white guy who was trying to detain her. And despite the fact that the couple eventually manages to find a railway station and move north, they are still being hunted.
The Underground Railroad is not just a metaphor, it actually exists. This is a real extensive network of paths and tunnels, dispersed underground throughout the American South. Cora and Caesar's first stop is a city in South Carolina. At first glance, the city seems like a paradise, which, of course, is not the case. The mask of a serene town hides a cunning scheme to exploit the black population. But there is no time to think - Ridgway, a ruthless hunter of runaway slaves, is hot on Cora's heels. Forced to take off again, the girl moves from state to state in search of freedom. The novel is worth reading not only for those interested American history, but also for everyone who loves adventure. Critics are comparing Whitehead's new novel to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a classic of 18th-century political satire. Well, one final argument: Barack Obama read The Underground Railroad while on vacation this summer.
"Pumpkin Blossoms: A Soldier's Story" by Matti Friedman
Canadian writer, journalist and Associated Press contributor Matti Friedman selects the hottest issues as subjects for his literary research. In 2012 it was The Aleppo Code, a detective documentary about Hebrew Bible X century, which was used by Moses Maimonides himself. In the course of his work, Friedman collected and analyzed a huge number of documents and eyewitness accounts, and then put forward own version what happened to a unique manuscript.
New novel The original name is “Pumpkin flowers”, and this needs some explanation. Pumpkin is the name small hill, located in Lebanon; flowers – because that’s what the Israeli military calls casualties in slang. So, the novel itself is a voluminous story about a small detachment of Israeli soldiers serving in Lebanon during the events of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Friedman does not limit himself to local autobiographical history, and, in addition, in his own words explains to the reader the reasons for the current situation in the Middle East today.
"The Other Brooklyn" by Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson, National Laureate literary prize USA, until recently she wrote exclusively for children and teen novels, and it was on this field that she gained all-American fame. But Another Brooklyn, already on the New York Times bestseller list, is a story for adults. The novel takes the reader to Brooklyn in the 1970s. The main character, together with her friends, finds herself in an area far from the reputation of a “boring suburb”. “The Other Brooklyn” is a place where ghosts rush through the night, mothers disappear, and their daughters are molested in dark alleys by merciless scum. Quite complicated, but life story about how sometimes illusions and real life differ.
"Lab Girl" by Hope Jaren
Hope Jaren is not a writer in the traditional sense of the word. Hope is a professional capital letters. She is a famous American geochemist and geobiologist, in work book which has a lifetime contract with the University of Hawaii, is an award-winning and active public figure(Jaren has repeatedly spoken out against sexism and sexual harassment in scientific community). “The Girl from the Lab” is a peculiar mix of memoirs and science fiction about botany, after reading which you may not become smarter, but you will definitely become interested in science.
"Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis" by Jay D. Vance
“You won’t read a more important book about America this year,” he said The Economist about the new novel by J.D. Vance, alumnus Yale University and the head of Silicon Valley's largest investment firm.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is an attempt to analyze the causes of the crisis of the American middle class, which, according to the author, has been going on for decades, only getting worse every year. According to the author himself, he wanted to tell the reader what it was like to “be born with a noose around your neck.” Quite a remarkable description of the capabilities social mobility in American society, it is recommended reading for anyone interested in the internal structure of other socio-economic systems.
"Swing Time" by Zadie Smith
An eternal story about children's friendship and real life, separating friends who promise never to part. The plot centers on the fate of two black girls who dream of becoming professional dancers. The first, Tracy, is talented and romantic; the second, Aimee, is rational and pragmatic. The touching friendship ends in the first half of the 1920s. The paths of the friends diverge forever, Tracy now dances in the corps de ballet, Aimee travels the world as an assistant to a famous singer. From London the novel's action moves to West Africa, where local girls, like the main characters of the novel once, dream of dancing on the big stage. But the blatant injustice and social inequality, which, it would seem, should have remained in the past, turn out to be today's reality.
Zadie Smith, the bestselling author, knows what she writes about firsthand. As a child, she herself was fond of tap dancing, and later was an actress in the London musical theater, and while studying at the university she worked part-time as a jazz singer.
"Mischlings", Affinity Konar
The title of the novel speaks about the content of the book. “Mischlings” or “half-breeds”... so in Nazi Germany called people who had mixed, “Aryan” and Jewish roots (for such racial identification the so-called Mischling tests were used). A terrible and dark time, for which the world and Germany in particular are still paying to this day.
The heroines of the novel, twin sisters Pel and Stasha Zagorski, were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here are our inhuman ones genetic experiments Josef Mengel, one of the bloodiest criminals of the Third Reich, conducts over the twins. One day Pel disappears. Stasha is grieving the loss of her sister, but believes that she is alive. After the liberation of a concentration camp by the Red Army, she and her friend Felix, a boy who himself lost his twin brother, travel through war-torn Poland, wondering what the new world will be like.
An emotionally difficult book marked “not for everyone.”
"No", Nathan Hill
The action of the novel includes a significant time period: from the protests of 1968, which swept many American cities (the year of the assassination of Malter Luther King) to the present day. The genre of the novel is tragicomedy. And you should read it because JJ Abrams took on the film adaptation, inviting Meryl Streep to play the leading role.
The Nix is Nathan Hill's debut novel about Samuel Andersen Anderson, whose hippie mother returns to the family decades after abandoning her. The matter doesn't end there. Returning to her native land, Fey (that’s the name of the heroine) does not give up her former views and first of all throws a stone at one of the local candidates of the election campaign. And now her son Samuel, an aspiring writer, will have to make a lot of efforts to help her get out of this difficult situation.
"Before the Fall" Noah Hawley
Noah Hawley is best known to Russian audiences as the screenwriter and executive producer of the crime-tragic-comic series Fargo. But this professional activity American writer not limited. Although the new novel is a confident application for a film adaptation. The plot and composition are appropriate. New York, foggy summer night, eleven passengers board a private jet. 16 minutes later, the jet will crash into the ocean, and only two will survive - the artist Scott Burrows and his four-year-old son, the heir of a powerful media tycoon. Actually, then the plot of the book proceeds as usual: the reader is introduced to the background stories of the passengers and crew members, thereby leading to the logical question: “Was it by chance that such authoritative and influential people ended up on the same plane?” Excellent suspense, one of those that can be read in one sitting.
"The Longest Night" Andria Williams
The situation in the world is heating up, the opinion that countries have once again entered into Cold War, while the "hot" war in different points globe never stopped. Andria Williams' new novel, released early this year, takes us back in time. 1959, remote military town in Idaho. Nat Collier, arrives here with his wife and two children with important mission– control the first in the country nuclear reactor. It soon becomes clear that the object is faulty and the world is in dire danger. The book is based on a real incident that occurred in the United States in 1961. Then it almost exploded over North Carolina thermonuclear bomb. A jammed control system allowed the hatches to open, and both shells (which were 260 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) fell over the city of Goldsboro.