The six authors on the short list for this year’s Booker Prize in mid-September are doubtless waiting to see who emerges triumphant on Nov. 12, when the winner is announced at a ceremony in London. Meanwhile, creative types who administer the prestigious competition have come up with ingenious ways to showcase contending authors Rachel Kushner (“Creation Lake”), Percival Everett (“James”), Anne Michaels (“Held”), Samantha Harvey (“Orbital”), Yael van Der Wooden (“The Safekeep”) and Charlotte Wood (“Stone Yard Devotional”).
By partnering again with the award-winning production company Merman Television and the hot young director Sebastian Thiel, the Booker Prize is mounting short films on Youtube and Instagram with well-known actors dramatizing excerpts from the novels. Shot in moody black-and-white in atmospheric surroundings and featuring penetrating closeups, the short films clock in around three minutes or less.
British actress Adelayo Adedayo from the current Netflix hit “Supacell” reads a bit from “Creation Lake” in which the undercover spy who calls herself “Sadie” recounts how she betrayed a young man who was smitten with her. Nonso Anozie, who played wandering loner Jepperd in the apocalyptic-themed “Sweet Tooth” series, enacts a section from “James” in which Huck Finn’s older Black rafting companion instructs young’uns how to stay on the right side of the white folks. Jason Isaacs, who played Lucius Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” films, dramatizes a scene from “Held”; Will Poulter, from the movies “The Revenant” and “Midsommar,” does a bit from “Orbital”; Tanya Reynolds, from “The Decameron” and “Sex Education,” reads from “The Safekeep” and Chipo Chung, from “Black Cake” and “His Dark Materials,” delivers the “Stone Yard Devotional” excerpt.
You can access the films via thebookerprizes.com; one of my favorites, from “James,” is here.
Author alert: Speaking of Rachel Kushner, the “Creation Lake” author has been in the Bay Area promoting her fourth book, and she has one more important event coming up. City Arts & Lectures hosts her 7:30 p.m. Dec. 12 appearance at Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St. in San Francisco. Tickets are $44-$54, available at cityarts.net.
In the pipeline: One of our country’s most beloved poets, and certainly one whose works are both approachable and endearing, Billy Collins will have his 12th collection of poems, “Water, Water” (Random House, $27, 144 pages) released on Nov. 19. He has said that he believes a poem is at its best if it “begins in clarity, but ends with a whiff of mystery,” and you can hear the two-term holder of the office of poet laureate of the United States read one of the 60 new poems from the book that illustrates that principle by going to his publisher’s website here.
A double dose of Murakami: Japan’s great literary treasure, the inimitable novelist Haruki Murakami (“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” “1Q84”) is ending a six-year hiatus with the publication, also Nov. 19, of “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” (Knopf, $35, 464 pages). In it, the author returns to and expands upon an otherworldly city he introduced readers to, but briefly, in an earlier novel, 2010’s “Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” which, probably not coincidentally, will also be rereleased by Knopf in a new translation and with a new forward by Murakami on Dec. 10. The brand-new novel takes a man, who has been haunted by the disappearance of his teenage girlfriend for years, on a voyage between worlds – is one of them imaginary or not? It sounds like vintage Murakami.
Page to stage: Murakami pops up again in November in connection with a live enactment of his 2014 short story “The Strange Library”—a novella, really, at 96 pages—being staged by intrepid theater troupe Word for Word at Z Below, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. The story concerns a boy who meanders into a library and encounters a couple of oddball characters, including a “sheep-man” who makes doughnuts and a girl without a voice, and they are all trying to get away from an overbearing and somewhat nasty librarian. Word for Word, as the name indicates, delivers the tale verbatim; the experience will be somewhat immersive for audience members, who will descend into the Z’s lobby in a way that mimics the labyrinthian environs of the library. Previews begin on Nov. 13 at 7 p.m.; the show runs through Dec. 8. Tickets are $40-$65 at zspace.org.
Memoirs en masse: Stage and screen actors who take time off to reflect on their lives and write about it are a dime a dozen, but this fall seems to be particularly flush with them. October brought the release of “Sonny Boy” (Penguin Press, $24.50, 384 pages), in which Al Pacino recalls getting bumped from a stage play early in his career by theater impresario Joseph Papp, who fired him even as he told him “You will be a great star someday.” In late September, we had “The Road Is Good” (Viking, $29, 335 pages) by Uzo Aduba, who won an Emmy in both comedy and the drama categories for her role as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in “Orange Is the New Black,” and stars in Shonda Rhimes’ upcoming Netflix series “The Residence.” On Nov. 12, we’ll have the paperback release, with new material included, of Matthew McConaughey’s “Greenlights” (Crown, $17, 320 pages), which USA Today labeled “the No. 1 celebrity memoir of the last 10 years” when it was published four years ago. On Nov. 19, the iconic singer and actress and new inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame goes them all one better with “Cher” (Dey Street Books, $28, 432 pages). With a subtitle “The Memoir, Part One,” it’s a truncated account of her life, taking her from childhood up to her marriage to Sonny Bono. Part Two will drop sometime next year.
A diagnosis at last: I’ve got to hand it to the always intriguing website openculture.com for identifying a malady I have which I never knew how to name. From a post that talked about foreign words which have no single-word equivalents in English and are hard to easily translate, I learned I suffer from tsundoku, which the Japanese describe as letting books pile up unread on the floor, the shelves or the nightstand. But I’m going to read them all some day!
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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