Word: booker
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...seemingly endless voyage"; safely ashore at Sydney Cove, he marvels that he has been at sea for nearly a year. In fact, the trip has taken much longer than that. William Golding first shoved Talbot off dry land in Rites of Passage (1980), which went on to win the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the author got back to Talbot's story in Close Quarters (1987). Fire Down Below completes Talbot's memoirs and provides a glimpse of the older man who wrote them. He has evidently...
...land where Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe, homosexuals became gays, and Esso became Exxon. But for many blacks, the choice of a word by which others will know them has a special significance. During their centuries of bondage, slaves had names that were often chosen by their masters. Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiography Up from Slavery that there was one point on which former slaves were generally agreed: "that they must change their names." This process of shucking off so-called slave names, commonly in favor of names with an African or Islamic flavor, persists. Malcolm Little...
...commercial flop, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit: that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction, and sold roughly half a million copies worldwide...
Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), was another roistering allegory, this time refracting recent events in Pakistan. It too was nominated for the Booker Prize, but at the presentation dinner the award went to another contender. Rushdie raised eyebrows by standing up and protesting the injustice of the decision. "The thing about Salman," says an editor who knows him, "is that if he won the Nobel Prize, he would not be happy until he had won it twice...
Clearly, Rev. Jesse Jackson has nitched a spot for himself in history. New Republic writer Hendrik Hertzberg has claimed that Jackson is one of the most important Black leaders in America this century, ranking him behind only Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King...