At her first attempt Desai, 35, not only became the youngest woman to win but achieved a victory which repeatedly eluded her mother. The esteemed Indian novelist Anita Desai - to whom The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated - has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker.
Also announced this week were the Finalists for the National Book Award.
The Fiction nominees are:
Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)
Emperor_Norton said:
*waves giant #1 foam finger in the air*
Go Team Danielewski! Whoooo!
I'd bet on Powers.
I was right.
Interestingly, he "wrote" the whole book by dictating it on a PC tablet which was running voice recognition software.
You wrote most of The Echo Maker on a tablet PC running voice recognition software. How did you arrive at that method of composition?
I%u2019ve always wanted the freedom to be completely disembodied when I%u2019m writing, to feel as if I%u2019m in a pure compositional state. Typing is a highly unnatural activity, and your writing style ends up reflecting the cognitive shackles. When I started to use the tablet, things that are extremely difficult to do on a word processor opened up to me. I could also make drawings to see what a character looked like, and these sketches would be integrated into my research. Part of the mystery of The Echo Maker hinges upon what happened on a certain stretch of road on the night of the accident. I figured that out visually by drawing the scene over and over and seeing how all the elements moved in relationship to one another.
PointBlank
New York, NY
November 2004
OCT 24, 2006 12:04 PM