New Awarded Books - World Literary Awards

2010-04-12 W W Norton & Co Inc

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010

Maxine Kumin

A representative selected volume gathering Maxine Kumin's poems from 1990 to 2010.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize

2010-04-05 Snowbooks

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne)

Mark Hodder

It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs and anarchy. Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as 'King's Spy'. His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured former friend, John Hanning Speke. Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all.

Philip K. Dick Award

2010-04-01 Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd

Berg

Hilary Menos

A debut collection of poems whose fresh energy is threaded with eccentricity and humor.

Forward Prizes for Poetry

2010-04-01 Univ of Chicago Pr

African American Writers and Classical Tradition

William W. Cook, James Tatum

A study of the relationship between African American writing and the classical tradition, showing how Black literature grew through, not apart from, inherited literary forms.

American Book Awards American Book Awards

2010-03-30 McClelland & Stewart

Ossuaries

Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. This is a work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.

Griffin Poetry Prize

2010-03-30 Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Stepping Stones

Dennis O'Driscoll

A long interview portrait of Seamus Heaney that retraces his life, his poems, and his ethical commitments from childhood through the Nobel Prize and beyond.

Irish Book Awards

2010-03-30 St Martins Pr

The Lotus Eaters

Tatjana Soli

A New York Times Best Seller! A New York Times Notable Book! A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotion and betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen's infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh's secret keeper, boss and truest friend. Tatjana Soli paints a searing portrait of an American womans struggle and triumph in Vietnam, a stirring canvas contrasting the wrenching horror of war and the treacherous narcotic of obsession with the redemptive power of love. Readers will be transfixed by this stunning novel of passion, duty and ambition among the ruins of war.

James Tait Black Memorial Prizes

2010-03-30 Picador USA

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg

A story collection that captures urban loneliness, ethical conflict, and the subtle distortions of conversation and relationships.

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

2010-03-25 Profile Books Ltd

Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China

Hilary Spurling

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

James Tait Black Memorial Prizes