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Last chance to vote in March/April fiction discussion poll
Below you will find four novels that have won the top book awards for fiction for 2011. Also, in 2011 Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize for his accomplishments during his entire literary career. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, American Pastoral has been included to acknowledge this achievement. These novels make up our March and April group fiction discussion poll.
All members of BookTalk.org are encouraged to participate in this poll. Each member has one vote, so please take a moment to read the details of each novel and select your choice for our next fiction discussion. Please submit your vote today for a great discussion starting in March!
2011 Man Booker International Prize winner PHILIP ROTH
Pulitzer Prize winner, 1997 American Pastoral
Quote:
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.
2011 Man Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes
Quote:
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
2011 National Book Award winner Salvage the Bones Jesmyn Ward
Quote:
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
2011 Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit From the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan
Quote:
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
2011 World Fantasy Award winner Who Fears Death Nnedi Okorafor
Quote:
In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue.
Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.
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Re: Poll for March/April fiction discussion now open
I won't be participating in this discussion, but I have to mention I'm a big fan of Jennifer Egan's work. GOON SQUAD is great as is her previous novel, THE KEEP. Both lend themselves to discussion too, perhaps THE KEEP moreso.
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Re: Poll for March/April fiction discussion now open
heledd wrote:
Am still deciding - but do we ever get to discuss something funny? Something that makes us laugh.
I think sarcasm makes books fun to read... my own work is sprinkled with it. But I've never read a book that is labeled as a comedy. Can you suggest one?
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Re: Poll for March/April fiction discussion now open
I didn't mean books overtly comic. I just finished re - reading Gerald Durrel's My Family and other Animals, and just laughed all the way through. It describes Greece so well.
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