Nominees
Album Of The Year
The Suburbs — Arcade Fire
Recovery — Eminem » Read the rest of this entry «
January 31st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Nominees
Album Of The Year
The Suburbs — Arcade Fire
Recovery — Eminem » Read the rest of this entry «
November 9th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
He is the person who, in 1990, “coined the phrase that circled the globe”, declaring on Mexican television, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship”, a statement which became an adage during the following decade.
Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, literally The City and the Dogs, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral, 1969/1975). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982), have been adapted as feature films.
Many of Vargas Llosa’s works are influenced by the writer’s perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.
Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms. He has subsequently supported moderate conservative candidates.
November 5th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Man Booker Prize Winner 2010, Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson (born 25 August 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.
His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic which plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel which is based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
His fiction, particularly in the five novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male–female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for their habit of creating doppelgängers of themselves in their fiction. Jacobson has been called “the English Philip Roth”.
His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a teen ping pong fan, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography to it. Both it and his 2002 novel Who’s Sorry Now – the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London – and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as “the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere.”
As well as his fiction, he also writes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a “liberal Zionist”.
On 12 October 2010, Jacobson was awarded the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Finkler Question. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about “love, loss and male friendship”. Chair of the judges, Sir Andrew Motion said “The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.” Jacobson is the oldest winner since William Golding’s win in 1980 and The Finkler Question is the first comic novel in the forty-two year history of the prize.
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be nominated for the Man Booker longlist or selected for inclusion in the shortlist.
September 28th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
June 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Two blockbuster films adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels have propelled the author’s romantic fiction to sales of an all-time high.
Sales of Sparks’ titles across all editions have sold more copies in the past six weeks (to the week ending 1st May) than throughout the entirety of 2009 according to Nielsen BookScan. Sparks racked up volume sales of 74,111 over the period, compared to 72,485 in all of 2009.
“Dear John”, starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, opened on 14th April, heading to number one in the UK film chart, while “The Last Song”, starring Miley Cyrus, went in at number four.
The Last Song, published by Sphere in hardback in September 2009 and in paperback in April 2010, has already sold nearly four times more than Sparks’ previous novel, The Lucky One, published in 2008. The Last Song has sold 41,760 copies since publication, while The Lucky One has so far racked up sales of 8,187.
The films also boosted his backlist, with A Walk to Remember and The Notebook, also both previously made into films, in particular receiving fillips.
(Source: TheBookseller.com)
March 6th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
It was at 8pm on 23rd February 2010 when I had attended Renesial Leong’s 2-hour property seminar that reminded me one of the ways of how the poor build their wealth from scratch. Below is the summary of some information that was shared during the property seminar:
The benefits of trading in properties by using the right plan include:
The pains of investing in properties by using the wrong plan include:
The most important tip to remember is to be always on a lookout to purchase properties that always have positive net income flow.
Visit PropertyMasteryAsia.com for more information on Renesial Leong.
(Ralph Tang)

Books by Renesial Leong
February 4th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Back in 1971, the Booker Prize was revamped to honour the best novel of the year based on its year of publications. In doing so, many books published in 1970 were left out in the dark with no opportunity of winning a Booker Prize… until this year. The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation.
A panel of 3 judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of 6 novels from a longlist of 22 books published during that period. They are Rachel Cooke, Katie Derham and Tobias Hill. These books would have been eligible and are still in print today. They are:
The shortlist will be announced in March but, as with the Best of the Booker in 2008, the international reading public will decide the winner by voting via the Man Booker Prize website. The overall winner will be announced in May.
January 6th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
The Costa Book Awards was pretty much unheard of, here – until 2005, when Malaysian-born Tash Aw won the award for Best First Novel for his book, The Harmony Silk Factory. His second book, The Invisible Map, was released last year.
The Costa Book Awards was previously known as the The Whitbread Literary Awards. Costa, a growing coffee shop chain in UK took over the ownership of the Book Awards in 2006. The Costa Book Awards has 5 categories and the winner of each category will win £ 5,000. The 2009 winners were announced on 5th January 2010. They are, as follows:
This year’s overall winner of the Costa Book Awards will be announced on 26th January 2010 and the winner stands to walk away with an additional £ 25,000.
December 24th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

(Source: Official Website of the Golden Globes Award)
I love watching award shows – though most of the time, being Astro-less, I’ll have to wait till the re-runs are on other channels. Or yes, I could just keep up with the news on the internet. So, it was with excitement that I found out that the nominations for the 67th Golden Globe Awards were announced recently. I’d scroll down the entire list and have my ”ooohs” and “aaaahs” upon seeing my favourites being nominated (again).
With trepidation, I also look out for a selection of books to read – especially those that have been adapted into movies. I prefer adaptations (book to movie) more than novelisations (movie to book). It’s fascinates me to watch see how creatively a movie could be visualised on the big screen based on a thin book or condensed into just two hours of viewing from a thick book that took us days and weeks to devour.
I’ve narrowed down some of the movies that have have related tie-ins:
5. Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture
6. Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
The winners of the Golden Globes will be announced on 17th January 2010, and the awards are usually used as a marker – the run-up to the prestigious Oscars (Academy Awards). 2009 saw the success of Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire become an overnight sensation when it won the Oscar for Best Movie. Perhaps another author is crossing his/her fingers that he/she made the right choice to have his/her book turn into an award-winning movie.

Golden Globes Award Trophies
December 15th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

The diverse culture of Malaysia invites travellers both local and foreign to marvel at towering cityscapes where modernity dazzles with luxury or go through old trunk roads surrounded by oil palm plantations to get to breathtaking mountains, caves, beaches and the tropical rainforests. And, of course, every traveller is amazed by food that can be exotic or a fusion of everything you know!
Perhaps during a jungle trek, you stumbled upon an enchanting place, or had a (nonfatal) swim with wild animals. Maybe you once spent an afternoon befriending villagers who had never met an urbanite off the beaten track before. If you were a journalist invited on a ‘famtrip’, did you encounter something outside the usual itinerary of visiting the most popular marketplaces, skyscrapers and restaurants? You might have enjoyed the tranquillity of a hideaway before it was discovered and destroyed in the name of progress and development. Here is a chance to recapture those scenes.
MPH GROUP PUBLISHING is looking for true travellers’ tales, preferably on places outside the tourist hubs in Malaysia. Stories should be in the form of travelogues with rich, firsthand descriptions of sights and sounds and even tastes. We want engaging stories that will move us to visit the places for ourselves and also to understand why we should preserve the beauty of such places. This is not a travel guide; we do not want to know just where to visit and how to get there. We do not want photographs; the words in the story should capture all the wonders. Tentatively entitled Sini Sana: Travels in Malaysia, we aim to publish the book in 2010, depending on the number of submissions we receive.
Travel stories must be original, nonfiction, between 3,000 and 5,000 words, and must not have been previously published. We invite submissions from both emerging and established writers. Manuscripts must be edited, typed double-spaced with 12pt font and emailed to editorial@mph.com.my. Please include your name, address, telephone number and email address. You may submit as many pieces as you wish. Faxed or handwritten submissions will not be entertained and manuscripts will not be returned. We will contact you only if your piece has been selected for inclusion in the compilation. Writers whose submissions are selected will be expected to work with the editors to fine tune their stories.
DEADLINE: 31 January 2010
PAYMENT: A small flat fee and two copies of the collection