“Does a butcher weep over the beauty of his lamb chops?”

"T. S. Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land
with corrections by Ezra Pound."
(from: entregulistanybostan)

“This weekend, as part of the New Zealand festival, The Luminaries author and winner of the Man Booker prize, Eleanor Catton, discussed deletion, deadlines and several other facets of the writer-editor relationship with her British editor Max Porter. If this sounds a little like sitting down with your ex-husband to publicly discuss why he always disliked your sense of humour, then think again; the modern editor is, according to Porter, ‘part proofreader, part therapist, part in-house champion and, increasingly, there to put a marketisation on the written word.’ […]
     With 391,000 books being self-published in the US in 2012 alone, the old 20th-century model of the creative editor is, according to Porter, ‘an endangered species.’ While Porter described his role as ‘like making a pot’ alongside a writer ‘using gentle tweaks and nudges,’ it is nevertheless a ‘highly irritable occupation.’ And a thankless one, judging from Catton's anecdote about sitting next to Germaine Greer at an awards ceremony as Greer leant over and whispered very loudly that, ‘there's no such thing’ as a good editor.
     At its foundation the role of the editor is a blend of meddler and midwife. You're expected to not just pinch, pluck and pull a novel into shape, but, in many cases, make sure the thing is being written at all.”
— Nell Frizzell, The Guardian
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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...

Man Booker Erfolgtraurigkeit

"Youth and heft triumphed at the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday, as 28-year-old New Zealand author Eleanor Catton won the fiction award for The Luminaries, an ambitious 832-page murder mystery set during a 19th-century gold rush.

     The choice should give heart to young authors of oversized tales. Catton is the youngest writer and only the second New Zealander to win the prestigious award — and her epic novel is easily the longest Booker champion.
     Travel writer Robert Macfarlane, who chaired the judging panel, called The Luminaries 'dazzling' and [predictably] 'luminous.'
— Jill Lawless, Salon
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"'I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel,' [Catton] says. 'In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.'
     And then there is the question of her youth. Though generally well-received in Britain, The Luminaries, she said, was subject to a 'bullying' reception from certain male reviewers of an older generation – particularly in her native New Zealand. 'People whose negative reaction has been most vehement have all been men over about 45,' she says.
     'One of those things that you learn in school about any kind of bullying is that it's always more to do with them than it is to do with you. I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.'"
— Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian
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Buy all of Eleanor Catton's books here...

"[...] a tour d'horizon of contemporary fiction"

"When Robert Macfarlane, the chair of this year's Man Booker Prize judges, announced the longlist he called it the most diverse in recent memory. He was right, and the same is still true of the shortlist he and his peers have just selected. The 151 novels they started with represented a tour d'horizon of contemporary fiction, a grand vista that encompassed everything from the epic to the miniaturist. The longlist distilled the numbers but kept the flavour and now the shortlist has intensified it further."

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta)
The Harvest by Jim Crace (Picador)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Penguin)

— The Man Booker Prizes
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"Two writers with Canadian credentials – B.C.-based writer Ruth Ozeki and London, Ont.-born Eleanor Catton – are among the six finalists for the prestigious Booker prize for fiction.
     A Tale for the Time Being by Ozeki, who is American born but now lives in Whaletown, B.C., and The Luminaries by Catton, who lives in New Zealand, are on the shortlist announced Tuesday for the £50,000 ($81,000) prize.
     The winner of the prize – open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth – will be announced Oct. 15."
— The Globe and Mail
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