"a trustworthy storyteller"

“2014's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Donna Tartt, for her latest novel The Goldfinch.
     Tartt's sprawling epic triumphed over the two other nominees, The Son by Philip Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis.
     Tartt's novel tells the story of Theodore Decker, an orphaned Manhattanite who winds up in possession of a renowned painting, Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch." Tartt's coming of age story follows Theo to Las Vegas, New York City's Lower East Side, and Amsterdam, where the events of his life are intermixed with his burgeoning theories on art and love.”
— Maddie Crum, Huffington Post
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“One of the greatest of Tartt's many gifts is her ability to assure readers that they're in the hands of a trustworthy storyteller. Her novels always feature surprising, in some cases preposterous, narrative elements, but she makes us believe them. She'll wrong-foot us, but she won't cheat us. Characters will certainly go off the rails, but the plot won't. This is an amazing achievement.”
— Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Times (October 17, 2013)
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See an earlier post that mentions The Goldfinch here...

And buy all of Donna Tartt's books here...

Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize Longlist Announced

“Donna Tartt, the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Goldfinch, and Eleanor Catton, whose novel The Luminaries has already won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, are among the 20 women nominated for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

     The award, which honors works written in English by women, was known as the Orange Prize until last year, when the liquor company Bailey’s took over as sponsor.
     Four British writers and seven from the United States made the list, along with writers from Ireland, Canada and Nigeria. The American contingent includes a former winner of the Orange Prize, Suzanne Berne, who was nominated for The Dogs of Littlefield. Anna Quindlen was nominated for Still Life With Bread Crumbs.
     The prize, which comes with an award of 30,000 pounds (a little over $50,000), has been won by Americans for the last five years, a statistic that some British critics and scholars see as a disturbing trend in the international rankings, at least as reflected in literary competitions.”
— William Grimes, ArtsBeat
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big books, big bucks

From: Collectors Weekly

"Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has 771 pages. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize, is 834 pages long. And then there is City on Fire, the 900-page debut novel that took the publishing industry by storm last week.

     It was even more evidence that the long novel is experiencing a resurgence, as a dozen publishers competed for the rights to release the book, set in New York City in the 1970s. City on Fire was written by Garth Risk Hallberg, a 34-year-old who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review and The Millions. Publishers who had a copy of the manuscript — and said they could concentrate on little else until they had finished reading it — rapturously compared it to work by Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon.
     The book drew an advance that is highly unusual for a debut novel. In a two-day bidding war, 10 publishers bid more than $1 million. Knopf emerged the victor, paying close to $2 million, said two people familiar with the negotiations.
     Before the acquisition, Diana Miller, an editor at Knopf, wrote Chris Parris-Lamb, Mr. Hallberg’s agent, an email praising the book, saying it was 'off the charts in its ambition, its powers of observation, its ability to be at once intellectual and emotionally generous.'”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Pre-order this book here...

big book

"[…] consider the novelist — in this case Donna Tartt, whose first novel, The Secret History, published in 1992, was greeted with critical hosannas and excellent sales. Her follow-up, The Little Friend, was published 10 years later. This means she labored over The Goldfinch, her latest novel, for at least as long. Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there must be periods of self-doubt. To write a novel this large and dense is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting. Especially when there are storms. Suppose, the writer thinks (must think), this is all for nothing? What if I’m failing and don’t know it? What if I make the crossing and am greeted not with cheers but with indifference or even contempt?

     It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of The Goldfinch, they never do."
— Stephen King, The New York Times
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Faulkner's Litmus Test

Faulkner's map og Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi
(From: U. of Michigan Library via Hub Pages)

"I write. It is what I have always done, searching for what Robert Frost called 'a momentary stay against confusion.'

     But I want more than just wisdom — every writer does, outside the most hopeless of naïfs. Like most of my fellow scribes, I also yearn for fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order. Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I would also like to write a play and perhaps some poetry, if there is time.
     Let me go further: If you do not want your own version of the above, if you are indeed a reasonable and/or responsible young man or woman, then literature is not for you. If you have a compelling personal story to tell, tell it to a therapist. An MBA will do you far more good than an MFA. Pursue writing only if you are pathologically unable to pursue anything else. Otherwise, consider advertising." — Alexander Nazaryan, Salon
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