There’s no Jonathan Franzen but Hanya Yanagihara adds another accolade to her Booker shortlisting in a relatively open year for American modern fictionLiterary commentators can probably now stop calling Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life a “sleeper hit”,seeing as it’s won a space on this years National Book award fiction longlist as well as the Booker shortlist. Yanagihara’s lyrical tragic novel approximately a group of friends coming of age in New York may gain had a slow start sales and publicity-wise, but it’s now just a regular passe literary success. That Yanagihara should be the most widely known name on the longlist – her only real rival in that regard is Nell Zink, and whose Mislaid generated plenty of its own press – suggests what an open and somewhat eclectic year it’s been for American modern fiction. Only American citizens are eligible for the National Book award,which significantly narrows the field of appropriate choices. And 2015 was not a year stuffed with many marquee releases, or at least not American ones. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com