Dear readers, Greg here, filling in for Joumana and just back from the Texas Book Festival in Austin, where I interviewed the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and spent a vivifying weekend celebrating books and the people who make them. There’s a lot of that going around at the moment, as awards season gets underway: In England yesterday, the Hungarian British writer David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh,” about an inarticulate but deeply feeling Hungarian man who ascends to the highest levels of British society through a combination of luck, violence and boorish charisma. As our critic Dwight Garner noted in his review, the book takes male alienation as a central theme: The hero, he writes, “has the detachment of a survivor. He comes off like one of those guys who hits the ‘door close’ button six times in every elevator he enters. Yet Szalay lets us feel his inchoate longing for meaning, for experience, for belonging.” (The novel’s ample dialogue also reveals the word “OK” to have “more shades of meaning” than you would think, Molly Young said when she recommended the book to readers. OK!) Sarah Jessica Parker, one of this year’s Booker judges, walked us through what she calls “the experience of a lifetime.” If your tastes in British literature run less to the laconic and more to the “slightly Gothic, mordantly funny, keenly observed, highly textured,” why not take a look at Sadie Stein’s great roundup of the essential Kate Atkinson? We’ll see you on Friday. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Love this email? Forward to a friend. Want this email? Sign-up here. Have a suggestion for this email? Then send us a note at books@nytimes.com.
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