{"id":4427,"date":"2022-05-01T15:32:13","date_gmt":"2022-05-01T20:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=4427"},"modified":"2022-05-01T15:32:13","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T20:32:13","slug":"meet-the-author-lionel-shriver-a-prometheus-best-novel-finalist-for-should-we-stay-or-should-we-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/meet-the-author-lionel-shriver-a-prometheus-best-novel-finalist-for-should-we-stay-or-should-we-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the author: Lionel Shriver, a Prometheus Best Novel finalist for Should We Stay Or Should We Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maverick American-British writer Lionel Shriver has been recognized \u2013 again \u2013 in the Prometheus Awards.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Author Lionel Shriver (Creative Commons License)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First nominated in 2017 for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,<\/em> which went on to become a Best Novel finalist, Shriver has been recognized as one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists for her novel Should We Stay Or Should We Go<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Shriver, a columnist for The Spectator\u00a0<\/em>magazine in Britain, may be best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin,\u00a0<\/em>an international bestseller adapted for the 2010 film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Shriver\u2019s provocative and timely novel, inspired by recent Columbine-style mass shootings by students in schools, explores a mother\u2019s disturbing quest to understand her teenage son\u2019s deadly violence, her own mixed feelings about motherhood and how the latter may have influenced the former.<\/p>\n

Shriver, who lives in London and Brooklyn, New York, was a National Book Award finalist for So Much for That. <\/em>Her contemporary novel revolves around\u00a0a crumbling marriage and a family struggling to cope with disease, dying and the high cost of today’s medical care.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As in Should We Stay or Should We Go<\/em>, Shriver’s New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World\u00a0<\/i>adopts an alternate-reality\u00a0framework – in this case, to probe the mysteries of love, free will and chance encounters as a woman explores romantic relationships with two very different men.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Shriver’s iconoclastic journalism \u2013 often skeptical of authoritarian tendencies on the Left or right, and \u00a0reflecting a hard-nosed realism that punctures common political delusions and collectivist or populist assumptions \u2013 has appeared in Harper\u2019s magazine, The Guardian<\/em>, the New York Times\u00a0<\/em>and the Wall Street Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n

Her other books include The Motion of the Body Through Space <\/em>(about the modern obsession with exercise, running and health)\u00a0and Property,\u00a0<\/em>an intriguing collection of stories on a subject rarely explored by mainstream novelists: the importance of property in our lives.<\/p>\n

Critics often praise her novels, but often do so with palpable mixed feelings \u2013 one sign of their provocative power to challenge conventional thinking.<\/p>\n

For instance, Ariel Levy, reviewing one of her novels in The New Yorker,\u00a0<\/em>wrote: \u201cWhat\u2019s remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters\u2019 ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues<\/p>\n

In The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047<\/em>, Shriver paints a dystopian portrait of \u00a0a recognizable modern family on the run and trying to survive the collapse of the U.S. economy from a rapacious federal government and its massive taxation, inflation and debt.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Mandibles, <\/em>one of the few dystopian novels with a suspenseful and compelling story drawn from an accurate understanding of both economics and the way markets, politics and dysfunctional governments actually work in the real world, became a 2017 Prometheus Best Novel finalist and remains a favorite of LFS members.<\/p>\n

(Check out Tom Jackson’s Prometheus Blog review<\/a> of The Mandibles.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Here is a capsule-review description of Shriver\u2019s Should We Stay Or Should We Go, <\/em>one of this year\u2019s Prometheus finalists:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/strong> Should We Stay or Should We Go<\/em><\/strong>,\u00a0<\/strong>by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins) \u2013 Explicitly affirming the libertarian self-ownership principle that \u201cOur lives belong to us… and it\u2019s up to us how we choose to end them,\u201d this kaleidoscopic novel explores 12 alternate-universe scenarios.<\/p>\n

An aging, comfortably affluent British married couple makes end-of-life decisions with unpredictable consequences.<\/p>\n

Shriver, with her characteristic wit and maverick insights, shows how aging and life\/death decisions are difficult enough but become much worse through government paternalism, welfare-state bureaucracies, socialized health care, forced medication, involuntary hospitalization, virtual imprisonment, anti-suicide laws, massive debt\/inflation and\/or other government dysfunctions.<\/p>\n

Variously evoking dystopian specters (Orwell, Burgess\u2019 A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, Kesey\u2019s One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest) <\/em>or exploring the downsides of seemingly utopian advances (super-long lives, cryogenics), the thought-provoking, fast-paced novel satirically but seriously offers timely cautionary tales as the average life expectancy of the world population rises into the 70s and beyond.<\/p>\n

Note: For a more in-depth look at Shriver\u2019s novel, visit this recent full-length Prometheus Blog review.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For a full list of winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.<\/p>\n

* Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital, and in some ways even more powerful than politics in the long run, by sparking innovation, better ideas, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights and differences.<\/p>\n

Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread better visions of the future that help humanity overcome tyranny, slavery and war and achieve universal liberty and human rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maverick American-British writer Lionel Shriver has been recognized \u2013 again \u2013 in the Prometheus Awards. First nominated in 2017 for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, which went on to become a Best Novel finalist, Shriver has been recognized as one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists for her novel Should We Stay Or Should We … Continue reading Meet the author: Lionel Shriver, a Prometheus Best Novel finalist for Should We Stay Or Should We Go<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,31,10],"tags":[1531,814,1372,1547,1532,1373,1545,1530,1533,1549,1546,1189,1548],"class_list":["post-4427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-updates","category-awards-news","category-news","tag-ariel-levy","tag-dystopian-literature","tag-lionel-shriver","tag-national-book-award","tag-property","tag-should-we-stay-or-should-we-go","tag-so-much-for-that","tag-the-mandibles","tag-the-motion-of-the-body-through-space","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-the-post-birthday-world","tag-the-spectator","tag-we-need-to-talk-about-kevin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-19p","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4427"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4467,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions\/4467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}