06-01-2013, 01:25 AM | #1 |
languorous autodidact ✦
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Short Nominations • June 2013
Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for June 2013!
The nominations will run for three days until June 4. Then, a separate voting poll will begin where the month's selection will be decided. Note - We no longer aim for a certain number of fully nominated works; rather, we now aim for a certain length of time for nominations (three days). The category for this month is: Short In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting. Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person. To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest. What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask! The floor is now open! * Nominations closed. Final nominations: In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul - Fully nominated Spoiler:
Berlin Stories by Robert Walser - Fully nominated Spoiler:
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor - Fully nominated Spoiler:
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami - Fully nominated Spoiler:
The Oil Jar and Other Stories by Luigi Pirandello - Fully nominated Spoiler:
The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E. M. Forster - Fully nominated Spoiler:
I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal - 3 Spoiler:
Last edited by sun surfer; 06-04-2013 at 01:27 AM. |
06-01-2013, 02:25 AM | #2 |
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I'll start us off by nominating In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul. It's a collection of two short stories and a novella and is short enough in length at around 250 pages. In a Free State won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1971.
Here's what Amazon says: No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife” -- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best. “V. S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful.” — The London Times “A Tolstoyan spirit....The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.” —John Updike, The New Yorker “The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.” —The New York |
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06-01-2013, 04:22 AM | #3 |
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06-01-2013, 06:35 AM | #4 |
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I nominate After the quake by Haruki Murakami (6 short stories, 200 pages, published in 2000)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_quake
"The stories were written in response to Japan's 1995 Kobe earthquake, and each story is affected peripherally by the disaster. Along withUnderground, a collection of interviews and essays about the 1995 Tokyo gas attacks, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a complex exploration of Japan's modern history, after the quake represents part of an effort on the part of Murakami to adopt a more purposeful exploration of the Japanese national conscience. The stories in after the quake repeat motifs, themes, and elements common in much of Murakami's earlier short stories and novels, but also present some notable stylistic changes. All six stories are told in the third person, as opposed to Murakami's much more familiar first person narrative established in his previous work. Additionally, only one of the stories contains clear supernatural elements, which are present in the majority of Murakami's stories. All of the stories are set in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attacks. Translator Jay Rubin says of the collection, "The central characters in after the quake live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on TV or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives. They are forced to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years." I never was one for short stories, but Murakami's thoughts on it (from the preface of Blind woman, sleeping willow) decided me to give these a chance. Spoiler:
Available: http://inkmesh.com/ebooks/after-quak...fter+the+quake http://www.amazon.com/After-The-Quak...aruki+murakami http://www.bookworld.com.au/search/a...dia_type=EBook http://www.amazon.ca/After-Quake-Sto...aruki+murakami Last edited by desertblues; 05-06-2015 at 11:22 AM. |
06-01-2013, 07:11 AM | #5 | |
o saeclum infacetum
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I'd like to nominate Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser.
From the publisher: Quote:
Kobo, where it's couponable |
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06-01-2013, 08:09 AM | #6 |
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I third In a Free State and I second Berlin Stories. I think I will read them anyway however the voting will end - thanks for this nomination, Issy!
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06-01-2013, 09:44 AM | #7 |
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I third Berlin stories and fourth In a free state
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06-01-2013, 12:30 PM | #8 |
Nameless Being
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I will second After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
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06-01-2013, 12:36 PM | #9 |
Nameless Being
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I will nominate I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal (256 pages according to Kindle edition).
In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia. First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history. Kindle ebook Barnes & Noble ebook Sony ebook Kobo ebook I will also nominate A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor (279 pages according to Kindle edition) The collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as "The Displaced Person" and eight other stories. Kindle ebook Barnes & Noble ebook Sony ebook Kobo ebook |
06-01-2013, 01:18 PM | #10 |
o saeclum infacetum
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I'd love to talk about Flannery O'Connor, so I second A Good Man is Hard to Find and hope my pb copy is not hard to find.
I'll also second I Served the King of England. Never heard of it and it sounds terrific. |
06-01-2013, 01:32 PM | #11 |
languorous autodidact ✦
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I fourth Berlin Stories.
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06-01-2013, 01:38 PM | #12 |
o saeclum infacetum
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So I was checking the local university library catalogue and see that this was made into a film in 2006 by the director of Closely Watched Trains, also a novel by Hrabal. I had no clue.
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06-01-2013, 01:54 PM | #13 |
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I'll third A good man is hard to find.
And.....interesting books again this month..... |
06-01-2013, 01:54 PM | #14 |
languorous autodidact ✦
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I knew the title sounded familiar! I wasn't familiar with the book so I was wondering why. It's because of the film which I did know about.
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06-01-2013, 02:04 PM | #15 |
Wizard
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one of those rare books I could not finish - I disliked it a lot. It was ages ago (ten - fifteen years?), so I will go along if it is eventually selected, but don't be angry if I do not support this nomination. I will fourth A good man is hard to find. and third after the quake.
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