Bookend
The Booker Prize for Fiction — which my colleague Peter Ackroyd helped to judge — has gone to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for her novel Heat and Dust. Congratulations to Miss Jhabvala, whose first major award this is, and to her publishers John Murray, who rarely win any awards. But a word of sympathy too for runner-up Thomas Keneally (Gossip From the Forest) who upholds an important Booker tradition of "once a short-list author, always a short-list author." Keneally was short-listed in 1972 for an earlier book, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. but had to give way to, of all people,. John Berger. Last year Beryl Bainbridge was short-listed for the second time but came away with nothing. The record rests with Iris Murdoch: in the seven years of Booker she has been short-listed three times without ever seeing her name on that £5,000 cheque.
Livingstone, I presume
The publishing industry loves "mystery" books — well-known author writing under pseudonym, well-known pseudonym writing under another pseudonym etc. — but the maverick American publisher Lyle Stuart has given a new twist to the game. He is currently selling what, by several accounts, is the most exotic book to hit the trade this year: a collection of women's sexual fantasies called To Turn You On. Some 44,000 copies were sold within a week of publication it was a Playboy Book Club Choice; paperback rights went to Bantam for 150,000 dollars; and Salvador Dali was apparently inspired to create six lithographs based on the book.
The author is one J. Aphrodite who, according to Lyle Stuart, "holds a responsible job in book publishing" but whose identity is being carefully concealed — even, we are told, from the lady's prospective paperbackers Bantam.
I agonised for several seconds before deciding that it would be improper to suggest that the author is Ms Carol Livingstone, who works with Lyle Stuart.
Buying guide
The best poetry may well be the most feigning; it can also be the most inaccessible. J. H. Prynne, who must by any reckoning be one of the most substantial poets, has successfully avoided the metropolitan publishers and his new volume, High Pink on Chrome, is available from Ferry Press, 177 Green Lane, London S.E.9. It is described as a "sequence," and it costs £1.20. And this, you can be assured, is a very small price to pay.
Burning topic
I knew I should never have mentioned it. Two weeks ago Bookend gave notice of a poetry reading at the Unity Theatre by the contributors to Live New Departures, the recent anthology published by Michael Horovitz. I now have to report that the Unity Theatre has burned down. Undeterred, Mr Horovitz and his fellow bards among them Messrs Logue, Patten and Nuttall — will be performing on 28th and 29th November at the Three Horseshoes Pub, Heath Street, Hampstead.
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