Boyko in Wall Street Journal, Globe & Mail

Who's that guy? D@*ned if I know.

It was a good weekend for Novelists, yes indeed, with wonderful write-ups in both The Globe & Mail and The Wall Street Journal. "Few writers in this country have a better poker face than C.P. Boyko," begins Michael Hingston in the Globe, going on to call him "vivid and wickedly funny," noting that "Boyko is at his best when documenting the ways in which writers insulate themselves from reality by adopting the trappings and jargon of the publishing world into their everyday lives." (He also, ahem, implies that authorship is a kind of terminal madness, and that writing short fiction perhaps lessens one's exposure, and thus the acuity of the condition. Could the same be said for the publishing short fiction? I wonder.)

Today, the same day, the very same day, our good friends over at The Wall Street Journal had this to say (noting that a review of Edward St. Aubyn's Lost for Words preceded it, and didn't fare quite so well):

The stories in C.P. Boyko's uproarious "Novelists" display authors in their many exotic varieties of misery and neurosis .... The signal trait shared by Mr. Boyko's dreamy wretches is egotism; they rarely have the faintest idea what is actually going on around them. (In "The Word 'Genius,' " the author of Edwardian-era melodramas sees a physician about his ulcers and turns out to suffer from hunger pangs, having forgotten to eat.) "The Prize Jury" calamitously throws a baker's dozen of novelists together to choose the winner of the Godskriva Prize, a one-time award honoring "the best novel of all time." (Being invited to serve as a judge gives one writer pause: "Wouldn't his being on the jury disqualify his own novels from being chosen?") Mr. Boyko's ensemble of absurd, inexhaustible narcissists is no more flattering than Mr. St. Aubyn's ship of fools, but it comes uncomfortably nearer to reality.

I'd say you could read the full review online, but really, that'd be a fib, since the WSJ security-monkeys are pretty fierce. You'll have to trust that I've given you the best bits. Happy Saturday, all, and happy long weekend. (Novelists go well with beaches & beer. I swear.)

"Africa's Bracing Chorus": Tuner of Silences in Wall Street Journal

We had a short but sweet nod to Mia Couto in the Fiction Chronicle this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. It was part of a round-up of recent African literature. The WSJ site security is pretty tight, so you won't be able to see it without a subscription, but here's a taster:

"For a long time, when people spoke of contemporary African literature, they were mostly talking about just two countries. South Africa, of course, with its canonical authors like J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. And Nigeria, whose prolific literary scene grew from the pioneering work of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. 

"But in recent years English readers have been bombarded by voices from all over the continent, bracingly enlarging our popular conception of Africa. Just recently we had both the redemptive, made-for-TV-movie fare of Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow, about post-civil-war Sierra Leone, and the subtle and elegant metaphysics of Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences, unpacking the legacy of Mozambique's wars for independence. Last year NoViolet Bulawayo's jagged and fragmentary We Need New Names gave an impressionistic glimpse of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, and Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go—one of the best books of 2013—was an ebullient drama of emigration and birthright."

You might also want to keep your eyes peeled this Friday, when The Tuner of Silences goes head to head with The Good Lord Bird in The Morning News's Tournament of Books. Fingers crossed!

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