The four-year-old Orange Prize for women's fiction may have a large purse at £30,000, but it also has a tendency to cause a lot of hoo-ha. This year was no exception when the chairwoman of the judging panel, Lola Young, declared on announcing Monday's short-list, that most of the British fiction was "piddling" and "parochial" compared to the American.
This scorn was reflected in the shortlist chosen by the panel: only one British novel, Julia Blackburn's The Leper's Companions, was chosen as compared to four from the US (Toni Morrison's Paradise, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighbourhood and Jane Hamilton's The Short History of a Prince) and one Canadian, Marilyn Bowering's Visible Words. Critics - including academic Elaine Showalter and Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review - immediately set upon Young's remarks, while Beryl Bainbridge, whose novel Master Georgie didn't make the shortlist, rather pithily remarked: "It is our piddling critics and judges which maybe are the problem".
Just when you thought that tales of Monica Lewinsky might have come to an end, news emerges from LA's BookExpo of two new books about the scandal. Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down the Presidency is due from Random House, with St Martin's Press publishing The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.
True to form, Hillary Clinton, far from wilting at the prospect of more Monica, is writing a book herself - on entertaining, for the Christmas market - while Gail Sheehy has finished off Hillary's Choice for Random House. Although John Updike has no new novel this autumn, Knopf is due to publish a 900page collection entitled More Matter: Essays and Criticism in September, and new novels are due from Isabel Allende, Gunter Grass, Patrick O'Brian, Michael Connelly, Michael Crichton; Susan Sontag and Thomas Harris.
Other books of interest touted at LA include a brace of biographies of dead icons (Diana in Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith and Joe DiMaggio by Richard Ben Cramer); a brace of biographies of living icons (Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan and Mailer by Mary V. Dearborn) and an intriguing-sounding new volume from Susan Faludi that promises to deal with the "collapse of traditional masculinity" and is rather appropriately called Stiffed.
July 21st marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Hemingway and fittingly there are two volumes for fans to look forward to in the same month. The first is a previously unpublished final novel, True At First Light, which was written in 1953 but sat upon by his family until now because of "unseemliness". An autobiographical work, it deals with his relationship with his last wife, Mary, and Debba, a young African woman who came into his life at that time, and will be published by Heinemann.
The other book is the concluding volume of Michael Reynolds' biography of the author. Entitled Hemingway: The Final Years, it covers the last 20 years of Papa's life and takes a look at his wartime activities. It will be published by Norton on July 21st and the publishers also plan to bring out the first four volumes of the biography in paperback by the summer.
A definite date for the diary is May 28th's evening of readings in St Anne's Church on Dublin's Dawson Street. Women writers including Jennifer Johnston, Anne Enright, Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins and Clare Boylan will be reading from their own work from 7.30 p.m. and admission is free. This is just one of a number of events taking place as part of the 7th WERRC Annual Conference, entitled "Celebrating Irish Women's Writing" (May 26th29th). The keynote speaker at the opening ceremony is poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and other speakers during the conference include novelists Mary Dorcey and Emma Donoghue and academics Ailbhe Smyth and Siobhan Kilfeather. More information is available from 01 706 8571 or werrc@ollamh.ucd.ie
Always good to see a new arrival on the literary scene - and the first issue of a new literary magazine, The Burning Bush, has made a very respectable entrance. Priced at £2.50, edited by Michael S. Begnal and Kevin Higgins and based in Galway, this issue contains new work by Fred Johnston and Louis de Paor; two poems by Texas-born singer/songwriter Steve Earle; a host of new poets and the battle cry "Where is the experimentalism? Is there an Irish underground?"