Man Booker 2009 shortlist

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009 shortlist was announced on Tuesday 8 September 2009.  Interviews with each of the authors can be found in the Perspective section along with audio extracts of each of their titles at the main Man Booker Prize website.
The winner will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2009.
For the second consecutive year, a teaser section of each of the titles is available to download to your mobile phone in both audio and text versions.

A S Byatt

The Children’s Book

Chatto & Windus

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes...
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J M Coetzee

Summertime

Harvill Secker

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on...

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Adam Foulds

The Quickening Maze

Jonathan Cape

The Quickening Maze is based on real events and is set in and around the High Beach Asylum in 1840....
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Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall

Fourth Estate

Set in England in the 1520s, Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his...

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Simon Mawer

The Glass Room

Little, Brown

High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a marvel of steel, glass and onyx. Built specially for...

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Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger

Virago

When Dr Faraday is urgently called to Hundreds Hall, he is both curious and nostalgic.  Nearly thirty years before, he had...

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Read more at the Man Booker Prize site: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/thisyear/shortlist.

[taking over the {virtual} world]

Created by Michael Wesch for his teaching on Cultural Anthropology; "a massive experiment in education created for (and by) [his] Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class at Kansas State University." He's begun a "world simulation" game where students must create their own "realistic" cultures. Fascinating - a real cross-over between *real* and *virtual* worlds.

Here is a taster:



More:



The conclusion:

[digitise or...don't]

Perhaps the Digitise or Die panel at London's Southbank Center precipitated fresh uneasiness for Faber & Faber (chief exec. Stephen Page was a panel member), inducing a quick move to snap up rights to Beckett's works (ah...print). I guess Page hasn't yet been able to answer his own musing: "How do we make money online?" and possibly is feeling remorseful on Faber's behalf for turning down the opportunity that came up 50 years ago.

For the whole story see The Guardian:

"Fifty years after turning down the opportunity to publish Samuel Beckett's work outside the theatre, Faber and Faber have snapped up the rights to his fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The complicated four-way deal involving John Calder, the writer's estate and French publishers Editions de Minuit unites the English-language publishing rights to his work as a whole for the first time."