Thursday, October 27, 2016

Man Booker for The Sellout and a Check-in on A Tale for the Time Being


Deserving Man (Booker)
I'm sure many of you saw that Paul Beatty and The Sellout won the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction on Tuesday night.  We can all take some small satisfaction that we were on the bandwagon relatively early. Yet another example of how The Morning News Tournament of Books identifies great books.  I was interested to read that The Sellout was originally considered "too harsh, too unconventional, too unfamiliar" and was turned down by 18 publishers before it was eventually published.

Incidentally, A Tale for the Time Being was a semi-finalist in the Tournament of Books and short-listed for the Man Booker prize. We have about a month left until our next meeting so I hope some of you have started the book.  Rudy passed along a great episode from This American Life that feathers in nicely with the book.  I've attached his comments below:




The 'Wind Phone' (kaze no denwa). Image from Mikinee."I happened to be listening to an episode of This American Life over the weekend and was amazed at how relevant it was to A Tale for the Time Being. I haven’t finished the book yet, so it might not be spot-on, but the TAL episode (from Sept. 23) started with a story about a guy in Japan who missed his dead relative and put a telephone booth in his back yard, although not hooked up to anything, so that he could “call” him to say the things he was thinking. Then, after the earthquake & tsunami, lots of people started to come to use his “kaze denwa” (wind phone) to talk to the people they lost. NHK filmed and recorded people so there’s lots of interesting footage."

The This American Life episode is online and available here.  It’s about 22 minutes long. Here's the NHK video.





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