Jewish Literary Prize

from the website:SomethingJewish


Books
Four books have been shortlisted for the annual Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction and Non-Fiction which comes with a £4,000.

The books - Secret by Phillippe Grimbert, Missing Kissinger by Etgar Keret, Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis and 1967 by Tom Segev - are aiming to scoop the top prize which has been won in previous years by notable authors including Zadie Smith, Amos Oz and Imre Kertesz.

In deciding on the shortlist, judge Francine Stock said: "This shortlist runs from a monumental work of history to brief, vivid short stories via a fine literary biography and an elegant novel of deception and remembrance. Each is in its way a revelation - the context of the 1967 war, hidden truths about wartime France, a writer pulled from the shade into just recognition and the sharp absurdities of life in contemporary Israel.”

The winner will be announced on May 7 at an awards ceremony to take place at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, central London.

Hoping Etgar Keret wins, the man's a genius!

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...and I'm still waiting to read *any* book by this man. There are *no* used copies of his books anywhere local to me!!

LT doesn't show many reviews on Etgar Keret. Can you tell us about him?

I've posted two reviews on LT of Keret's work, of Gaza Blues and The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. Hopefully those will give you a flavour of the man's writing. My copy of the latter has a cover review which calls it "slacker midrash" if that helps as a further clue.

I first came across him at London's Jewish Book Week, where he made an appearance in 2007. His speciality is the very short story. Few run to more than 5 pages but many are quirky, funny, surreal, touching and beautifully written, or at least the English translations are - my Hebrew is not up to reading the originals! Missing Kissinger is on my shelves.

He is also a film maker. I saw a screening of his film "Meduzot" ("Jellyfish") at last year's London Film Festival which was a kind of Israeli Short Cuts blending a number of story strands together. I believe his day job is as a film professor at Tel Aviv University.

He's also been involved in graphic novels, but I've never been able to find any so can't comment on them.

Thanks, he sounds great. I checked Amazon, SqueakyChu, and they have lots of used books by Keret. I definitely plan to try one!

Grammath=- you may be interested that in the Jewish Bibliophiles Group there is a discussion of Graphic Novels with Jewish themes.

I'm so happy. Avaland said just today she'd send me a book by Keret. I'm now eagerly awaiting it.

Cheers, Bert.

I'm waiting for Todd Hasak-Lowy to get some recognition. His short stories are amazing (The Task of this Translator), but hard to find. I hope he has a full-length book in the works.

Libby Cone

There is a review of the Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret in the Summer 2008 issue of Pakn Trager (the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center).