Ludmila Ulitskaya Wins Austrian State Prize for European Literature

Das macht mich sehr glücklich! I could sing Pharrell.

With past winners Auden, Pinter, Calvino, Beauvoir, Lessing, Kundera, Duras, Rushdie, Eco, Barnes, and, last year, John Banville, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature is always worth following, never more so than today's award to Ludmila Ulitskaya. The best book to begin with is the pure-Greek and mixed-Russian family tale Medea and Her Children [Kindle], which also provides a much-needed window into the Crimea. Follow that with the novel of exiles in New York, The Funeral Party, and then her ambitious Daniel Stein, Interpreter, bringing together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Read Ulitskaya now -- as you know the Nobel committee is -- before all the December hoopla when FSG releases a major new work, The Big Green Tent spanning decades in the lives of three Soviet dissidents caught in the country's fall and rise and fall.