There more and more book awards every year, which makes it a little easier to find high quality titles. Here for your reading consideration are a few regional award winners from a few far flung places:
“From award-winning journalist David Walsh, the definitive account of the author’s twelve-year quest to uncover and make known the truth about Lance Armstrong’s long history of performance-enhancing drug use, which ultimately led to the cyclist’s being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles”
“A long-lost letter links two disparate characters, each searching for meaning against seemingly insurmountable odds.
One is a Russian world chess champion who has turned to dissident politics. The other is an American woman who finds a copy of the letter her late father had written to the young chess champion, to which he’d never received adequate response.”
“San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God’s Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves–“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years.”
Translation in Fiction Blindly(M) by Claudio Magris ; English translation by Anne Milano Appel
“Hailed as a masterpiece upon its initial publication in Italy, BLINDLY is a novel of highly original, poetic intensity. In a shifting, choral monologue – part confession, part psychiatric session – a man recounts (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, which has passed through the horrors, the hopes and betrayals, and the revolution of the last century, as well as through different lands and seas. Who is the mysterious narrator? He is all the partisans, prisoners, seamen, and rebels who experience the perils and injustices of persecution, war, violence and adventure. From the award-winning author of DANUBE”
Satantango(M) by László Krasznahorkai ; translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
“Set in an isolated hamlet, Satantango unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance.”
“Maidenhead offers an uncensored take on an omnivorous, shame-ridden teenage sexual brain. On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him. When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games. As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl’s self-consciousness.”
