A Word About Awards

100 STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED by Melissa Panarello   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2006   Date Read: April 18, 2006   From Kirkus Reviews: “Just when you thought you were proof against sex scandals, the young Ms. P., reportedly 16 at the time of writing, obliges with a remarkable two-year sexual odyssey.   The narrator is a schoolgirl whose first sexual experiences involve looking at herself in the mirror with love and admiration. Melissa has friends who touch themselves and dream of giving themselves to boys, but she’s in no hurry for a relationship—she wants to be “lovely, brilliant, poetic.” For better or worse, the acquaintances who soon take her through the gate of the secret garden supply quite a different range of encounters. Daniele is a callow student indifferent to her needs and wishes. Roberto, the law student, is more articulate, but his gentleness turns to brutality behind closed doors. Fabrizio, the 35-year-old married man she meets in a “Perverse Sex” chat room (many

10:04   by Ben Lerner   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2016, Rathbone Folio Finalist   Date Read: March 25, 2015   From Kirkus Review: “An acclaimed but modest-selling novelist (not unlike the author himself) muses semiautobiographically on time, life and art. “Proprioception”: The narrator of Lerner’s knotty second novel returns often to that word. It refers to the sense of where one’s own body is in relation to things, a signature theme for an author who’s determined to pinpoint exactly where he is emotionally and philosophically. As the novel opens, our hero has earned a hefty advance for his second book on the strength of his debut and a New Yorker story. This echoes Lerner’s real life, in which his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), was a critical hit; the New Yorker story included in this novel did indeed appear in the magazine. What to make of such self-referentiality? More than you’d expect. Lerner blurs the lines between fact and fiction not out of self-indulgence b