Booker prize longlist promises to 'entertain and provoke'

There were no real wild cards in this longlist – unlike last year, when Me Cheeta, a spoof biography of Tarzan's chimpanzee, was listed. Perhaps the most controversial novel is Emma Donoghue's Room, inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl who kept his daughter prisoner for 24 years. The novel, which was one of 14 called in by judges – rather than being submitted by the publisher – was installed as second favourite for the prize by Ladbrokes.

Three other previously shortlisted novelists made it on to the longlist. Rose Tremain for Trespass; Damon Galgut for In a Strange Room and a novel that will be many people's favourite for the prize: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell's fifth novel is set in 1799 on the peculiar artificial island of Dejima created for Dutch traders making contact with a closed Japan.

The list was completed by Helen Dunmore for Betrayal; Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question; Andrea Levy for The Long Song; Tom McCarthy for C; Lisa Moore for February; Paul Murray for Skippy Dies (the main character looks like the TV kangaroo); Alan Warner for The Star in the Bright Sky; and a book which has featured on many summer reading lists – The Slap by Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas which tells of the consequences of a child being hit at a suburban barbecue.

- Mark Brown, Guardian.co.uk

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Judging a book by its cover

The Book Cover Archive presents an archive of book cover design and designers 'for the purpose of appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design'.

This site is edited and maintained by Ben Pieratt of General Projects and Eric Jacobsen of Whisky Van Gogh Go.

Visit by clicking here.

Other great sites for book cover design:

• The Casual Optimist
• The Book Design Review
• Book Covers Anonymous
• Covers
• Faceout Books
• Judge a Book...
• Tal Designz
• The Penguin Blog
• Peter Mendelsund's Jacket Mechanical
• Readerville Most Coveted Covers
• Old-Timey Paperbacks
• War of the Worlds cover archive
• The Pelican Project
• Joe Kral's Penguin Collection

Makeover for Wonder Woman at 69

The costume ties into an alternative history for the character devised by J. Michael Straczynski, the new writer of the series, and into a quest by DC to shine a critical and creative spotlight on the heroine, who stands with Superman and Batman in its primary triumvirate of superstars, despite her series’s modest sales.

In the reimagining of her story, Wonder Woman, instead of growing up on Paradise Island with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, and her Amazon sisters, is smuggled out as a baby when unknown forces destroy her home and slaughter its inhabitants.

Mr. Straczynski, who created the television show “Babylon 5” and wrote the screenplay for “Changeling” in 2008, starring Angelina Jolie, said in an e-mail message that he wanted to address “the wardrobe issue” as soon as he took the job.
“She’s been locked into pretty much the exact same outfit since her debut in 1941,” Mr. Straczynski wrote. “If you’re going to make a statement about bringing Wonder Woman into the 21st century, you need to be bold and you need to make it visual. I wanted to toughen her up, and give her a modern sensibility.”

- George Gene Gustines, The New York Times

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Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna beats Wolf Hall to Orange prize

An epic, ambitious novel that straddles the Mexican revolution and the crazed communist witch-hunts of 1950s America was tonight named winner of this year's Orange prize for fiction.

Barbara Kingsolver took the £30,000 prize for The Lacuna, her eagerly awaited first novel since 2000.
The American novelist held off heavyweight competition from Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall, and Lorrie Moore, for A Gate at the Stairs, to take what is the biggest literary award for women writers.
Daisy Goodwin, the TV producer who chaired this year's judges, praised The Lacuna's "breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy" and said the winner was only ever between the three books. "It was a bit like trying to choose between your three beloved children," she said.

"In the end I suppose that while a couple of us felt very passionately about The Lacuna everyone was happy for it to be named winner. They were three of the finest books I've read in a long time. It wasn't like we were scraping in any sense."
The Lacuna, made up of memoir, diaries, letters, newspaper reports and congressional transcripts, is arguably the most demanding of the six books on the shortlist. It's a doorstopping novel that needs to be read properly rather than in snatches and tackles big subjects that resonate today – not least, the media creation of, and obsession with, celebrity.
Beginning in 1929, it follows the life of Harrison Shepherd from his sensitive teenage years in Mexico to fame in 1950s America as the reclusive author of Aztec swashbucklers. In between – and central to the story – Shepherd gets work in the bohemian household of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo while they entertain house guest Leon Trotsky, for whom he becomes a scribe.

- Mark Brown, Guardian.co.uk

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The Sunday Times Literary Awards longlist announced

Winner to be announced on the 24th of July ...

1. Patterns of Change by Dr Eckart Schumann

2. To Heaven by Water by Justin Cartwright

3. Summertime by JM Coetzee

4. Come Sunday by Isla Morley

5. Beasts of Prey by Rob Marsh

6. The Double Crown by Marie Heese

7. Saracen at the Gates by Zinaid Meeran

8. Black Petals by Bryan Rostron

9. The Transplant Men by Jane Taylor

10. Counting Sleeping Beauties by Hazel Frankel

11. Shiva's Dance by Elana Bregin

12. Trinity Rising by Fiona Snykers

13. Daddy's Girl by Margie Orford

14. The Shape of Him by Gillian Hope Schierhout

15. Trespass by Dawn Garisch

16. Small Moving Parts by Sally-Ann Murray

17.The Elephant in the Room by Maya Fowler

18. The Book of the Dead by Kgebetli Moele

19. Little Ice Cream Boy by Jacques Pauw

20. Sleeper's Wake by Allistair Morgan

21. House of War by Hamilton Wende

22. Black Diamond by Zakes Mda

23. Kings of the Water by Mark Behr

24. Exhibit A by Sarah Lotz

25. Revenge of Kali by Aziz Hassim

26. The Bird of Heaven by Peter Dunseith

27. My Name is Vaselinetjie by Anoeschka von Meck

28. A Man Who is Not a Man by Thando Mgqolozana

29. High Low In-between by Imraan Coovadia

30. Shark by Carel van der Merwe

31. Refuge by Andrew Brown

Charles Saatchi on Art & Life

One of the world’s foremost art collectors answers questions from readers on why he collects, what he would ask Moses and Darwin—and the greatest mysteries of the universe.

Charles Saatchi has been one of the most influential forces of the contemporary art scene. Founder of global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and the most influential art collector of our time, he has vigorously shaped the contemporary art scene while contradictorily remaining an elusive, even reclusive figure.

Though he—famously—refuses to be interviewed, you can now read his brutally frank responses to a battery of questions put to him by leading journalists and critics as well as members of the public.

Do you believe in the 10 Commandments?

An overrated lifestyle guide, unsustainable and largely ineffective, only succeeding in making people confused and guilty.

For example: You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.

This was always obviously a no-hoper of a Commandment. Coveting is all everyone does, all the time, everyday. It’s what drives the world economy, pushes people to make a go of their lives, so that they can afford the Executive model of their Ford Mondeo to park next to their neighbor’s Standard model.

And would you want to be married to someone who nobody coveted?

- The Daily Beast

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Ian McEwan brings home bacon with comic novel Solar

Booker winner bags pig and champagne for 'laugh-out-loud' climate change novel

Ian McEwan's trophy cabinet has heretofore been home to more serious awards, but the Booker prize-winning author will today be making room on the shelves for his first comic-fiction accolade, won for his take on climate change, Solar.

The novel was chosen unanimously from a shortlist of five books to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. "I hope he'll be really, really pleased," said judge and director of the Guardian Hay festival, Peter Florence. McEwan claimed at the festival two years ago: "I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh."

McEwan, though, said today he was "delighted" to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse, "three names associated with distinctive and important pleasures".

"Some prizes offer fifty thousand pounds, but this one comes with a Gloucester Old Spot piglet attached and I'll be honoured to hold it in my arms. As long as it behaves," the author added.

Florence said Solar provided many moments of "laugh-out-loud" humour, thanks to McEwan's "beautiful phrasing" and "descriptions of infidelity and intimate personal details". Florence said that despite McEwan's "macabre and serious" reputation, he'd "always found there are moments of amazing humour in lots of his books, even The Child in Time. He's so precise with his language and he makes his point so brilliantly with humour. In Solar, there's this wonderful, bloated, chaotic man, just like our planet, hurtling to his destruction, taking no responsibility for himself at all, and it's a gloriously funny idea."

- Alison Flood, Guardian.co.uk

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