Trevor, as to your serious question about Melville–alas, the only person I know who could answer with any authority is Professor Zimmerman, and he retired. I guess you’ll just have to keep reading and judge for yourself!

but you will have to search 2009 by title. I’ve also read and reviewed Love and Summer and quite liked it — click on Trevor in the right sidebar for a link.

The IMPAC “longlist” is actually every book that has been nominated by libraries around the world. It is an interesting source of possible reading titles, but I don’t think much more since there has been no vetting at all. I have found the shortlist to be very worthwhile reading. In both years, I had already read about half and found the pointers to the rest (that included The Twin last year to be very worthwhile. I think IMPAC is much under-rated prized. I will probably try to read the entire shortlist again this year.

Can anyone tell me when the IMPAC winner is announced? I can’t find a date on their site, or anywhere. Is it a surprise?

It’s June 11th. They’ve never really been any good at keeping the site updated – the FAQs still talk about submitting books for 2007, which would have been in 2006 – but you can get the information from the news page</a., which has the following to say, tucked in amongst everything else:

I’ve reviewed one of the five not in the “Big Three” (Oscar Wao, Reluctant Fundamentalist and Animal’s People — all with excellent reviews here and elsewhere) and will be posting reviews on the last four starting next week. A most interesting list and perhaps a surprising result. I will have a “predict the IMPAC winner” contest up on my site by June 1 — trying to figure out the tiebreaker right now.

I didn’t know what The Archivist’s Story was about until Kevin reviewed it, and it definitely has my interest, more so than the three books to win and be finalists in the Pulitzer (though that can change in just a sentence!).