Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Gathering by Anne Enright gets 2007 Man Booker Prize

Ireland's Anne Enright was awarded the Booker Prize for her fourth novel The Gathering.

The novel covers three generations of an Irish family and is set in Ireland and England. Its title refers to the funeral of Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic who committed suicide in the sea at Brighton. His mother and the nine surviving Hegarty children gather in Dublin for his wake. The novel's narrator is 39-year-old Veronica, the sibling that was closest to Liam. She looks through her family's troubled history to try and make sense of his death. She thinks that the reason for his alcoholism lies in something that happened to him in childhood when he stayed in his grandmother's house.
(as per en.Wiki)

Another favorite Booker prize author is South Africa's J. M. Coetzee who was awarded the prize first in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K and later in 1999 for Disgrace.

Stephen Colbert's coined 'truthiness'

And here is Stephen Colbert's coined 'truthiness' as per English Wikipedia's entry:

Truthiness is a satirical term created by television comedian Stephen Colbert to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. Colbert created this definition of the word during the inaugural episode of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd". It was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster. By using the term as part of his satirical routine, Colbert sought to criticize the use of "truthiness" as an appeal to emotion and tool of rhetoric in contemporary socio-political discourse.

Courtesy of Wikipedia