Prizes and discussions about reviewing

Congratulations to Jim Shepard who, reports BookFox, has won the $20,000 Short Story Prize for his collection, Like You'd Understand Anyway. BookFox (who reviewed Roddy Doyle's collection, The Deportees, for Issue 4 of The Short Review) says the collection

has a zest for exploration and a penchant for far-flung corners of the earth (Chernobyl, Hadrian's Wall, space), while balancing these journeys with the ballast of traumatizing relationships.

For the rest of the blog post, click here.

Over on Fiction Bitch's blog, there has been an interesting discussion on reviewing. In a post entitled "Positive Reviewing: A Cultural Error", she says:

in my opinion a concern with the 'author' and the author's feelings is quite misplaced in any serious literary debate (and is in danger of playing into the cult of personality). Any serious critic should be concerned foremost with literature, with books and with the more general issues of literary culture, and serious writers worth their salt know that the books they have written, once they are published, are entities separate from themselves, indeed no longer their personal properties but the property of others and components of a wider literary culture.

This issue was also discussed over at book blog Vulpes Libris.

Food for thought for reviewers and readers alike.