One of those debut novels is Jeet Thayil’s dazzling Narcopolis, which weaves together the stories of a handful of characters as they move through the recent history of India and Bombay (I have elected to use the city’s old name, in keeping with the author’s choice in the novel). The only previous winner on the list is also one of the women I almost can’t conceive of that happening in American prizes, not least because there are so few women who win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, or other prestigious prizes. Four of the authors are British, one is Indian, and one is Malaysian. This year’s shortlist of six authors includes three men and three women. In this year’s Booker shortlist, the finalists are quite unlike the lists we have been seeing of late in the United States. Recently there has been a lot of press about “readability,” and about the Booker judges and their intense literary snobbery (as if this is at all surprising), and so I am particularly interested in their decision this year. On October 16, the Man Booker Prize judges will announce a winner, and I can’t wait. I especially love this 2012 review for its take on the critical approach to works of high literary quality. We miss him dearly, but are ever-grateful for the time he spent with Cobalt. Rafe Posey, one of Cobalt’s founders and its first fiction editor, has been writing book reviews since 1989, when he found himself admiring a photo book called The Dog in Art.

Narcopolis review