A Word About Awards

SKYLARK FARM by Antonia Arslan   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2009, LA Times Finalist 2007   Date Read: February 24, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ One family’s heartbreaking experience during the 1915 Armenian genocide.   In a small Anatolian hill town, Turks and Armenians live together in relative harmony for generations. But when, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire allies itself with Germany in the brewing world war, Turkish citizens are forced to take sides. Sempad Arslanian, however, remains oblivious to political change. Head of his large, wealthy clan and benefactor to his neighbors—Turk, Greek and Armenian alike—he spends the Spring of 1915 joyfully preparing for a reunion with his brother Yerwant, who, at 13, left Skylark Farm, the family’s country estate, to study in Italy. Preparations by both brothers rival ceremonial planning for royal visits: Sempad orders stained glass windows from England and levels a pasture for a tennis court; Yerwant outfits a red Isotta Fraschini for his ro

THE PRESIDENT & THE FROG by Carolina De Robertis   Nominations: PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2022, PEN/Jean Stein Finalist 2022   Date Read: February 22, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  former Latin American president reminisces on his remarkable life.   In Kirkus Prize finalist De Robertis’ new novel, the unnamed former president of a Latin American country is interviewed by a journalist. Inspired by the life of José Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, the novel’s 82-year-old protagonist—affectionately dubbed the “Poorest President in the World”—lives in a humble home with his wife and dogs and tends his infamous garden. As he sits down with the Norwegian interviewer, the former president finds himself drawn to her and wonders if he should share the deepest secret of his life, which he dubs “the story of the frog.” The narrative oscillates between the present-day interview (set shortly after the 2016 U.S. election) and memories of his past. A former guerrilla and revolutionary, he s

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood   Award: Booker Winner 2000   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2002, Women’s Prize Finalist 2001   Date Read: February 21, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Atwood’s skillfully woven tenth novel is her most ambitious and challenging work to date, and a worthy successor to her recent triumph,  Alias Grace  (1996).   It tells two absorbing stories that cast an initially enigmatic, ultimately pitilessly revealing light on each other. The central one is octogenarian Iris Griffen’s bitter reminiscence of her life as the privileged daughter of a prosperous Ontario family, the Chases, and later as wife to Richard Griffen, the businessman who effectively inherits and firmly directs the Chase fortunes. The counterpart story,  The Blind Assassin , is a strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual (faux-Oriental) fashion a nameless woman’s obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit his “power” over her. This latter tale

FALCONER by John Cheever   Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1977, NY Times Finalist 1977   Date Read: February 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ It is many years since we left the Steuben glasshouse world that was, so unmistakably, Cheerer country. Via Bullet Park, a gentler, more vulnerable book than this, he introduced his broader and deeper ranging metaphysics of life and death, always in mysterious tandem. They're constants here in Falconer prison where Farragut, 734-508-32, a fratricide and a drug addict, is serving a zip to ten sentence. The drug he really hopes to find is a "distillate of earth, air, water, and fire." While Farragut reflects on his mortality and courts "death's dark simples," filth and degeneracy—redolent of Genet—are all around him. The Valley, for instance, is a urinal trough where you really go to relieve other needs unless you've turned homosexual. Farragut is briefly drawn to Jody, indicted on 53 counts, Jod

CITY OF BOHANE by Kevin Barry   Award: Dublin Winner 2013   Date Read: February 11, 2024   From Kirkus Review: “ Gangland warfare rules the day in an imagined, decivilized Irish city.    Roll up Joyce, Dickens, Anthony Burgess and Marty Scorsese, sprinkle with a dash of Terry Gilliam, and smoke up. That’s roughly the literary experience to be had from ingesting this marvelously mashed-up creation from Irish storyteller Barry ( There Are Little Kingdoms , 2007). The author goes for broke in constructing his fictional City of Bohane, a once-great city on the west coast of Ireland that has taken 40 years to fall into utter decay. The setting is a rich stew of ethnicities, loyalties, gangster cred, vices and technologically barren conflicts. Different provinces promise different pleasures: parallel streets in New Town, barely controlled chaos in the Back Trace, fetish parlors and shooting galleries in Smoketown, all behind the moat of the Big Nothin’. Pulling the strings on this criminalit

THE BLAZING WORLD by Siri Hustvedt   Award: LA Times Winner 2014   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2014, Dublin Longlist 2016, Kirkus Finalist 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An embittered female artist plays a trick on critics that goes badly awry in Hustvedt’s latest ( The Summer Without Men,  2011, etc.).   An “Editor’s Introduction” sets up the premise: After the 1995 death of her husband, art dealer Felix Lord, Harriet Burden embarked on a project she called  Maskings,  in which she engaged three male artists to exhibit her work as their own, to expose the art world’s sexism and to reveal “how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” Readers of Hustvedt’s essay collections ( Living, Thinking, Looking,  2012, etc.) will recognize the writer’s long-standing interest in questions of perception, and her searching intellect is also evident here. But as the story of Harry’s life coheres—assembled from her notebooks, vario

THE FALLS by Joyce Carol Oates   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2006, Women’s Longlist 2005   Date Read: February 3, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Oates ( I Am No One You Know , 2003, etc.) painstakingly examines the impulse toward self-destruction—and the ways we find to heal ourselves.   The story spans nearly 30 years, beginning in 1950 when newlywed Gilbert Erskine leaps into Niagara Falls to his death, forever traumatizing his bride Ariah, a “spinster” music teacher who had awkwardly stumbled into a marriage neither spouse wanted. The hallucinatory opening section traces Ariah’s growing embitterment while introducing young attorney Dirk Burnaby, who impulsively comforts “the Widow-Bride of The Falls,” just as impulsively proposes a year after Gilbert's demise—and is accepted. The Burnabys settle in Niagara Falls, produce three children, and keep their often volatile marriage together (despite Ariah's emotional instability and paranoia) until Dirk, moved by the passionate act