Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of CP Cavafy by Louis de Bernières
27 Aug 2013 02:32:49
Louis de Bernières has always said he was a poet before – and after – being a novelist. He has said that this is how his fiction – including Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), Birds Without Wings (2004) and the short-story collection Notwithstanding (2009) – began. But this is his first published collection, and it is a homage to Constantine Cavafy (or, as De Bernières calls him, Constantinos Cavafis) (1863-1933), the Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, author of Ithaca and Waiting for the Barba... Read Full Story
Noble Endeavours by Miranda Seymour
27 Aug 2013 02:30:22
Amid such signs that next year's centenary of the outbreak of the first world war will be used as an excuse for chauvinism against 21st-century Germans, Miranda Seymour deserves to be hailed for her courage, generosity, imagination and decency. She has spent five years investigating the history of Anglo-German relations in order to celebrate the amity and sympathies shared between the two countries since the 17th century. She disapproves of the way the English still buffet, insult and stereotype... Read Full Story
The Kills by Richard House
25 Aug 2013 00:41:07
The Kills spans four "books" or parts, and is published in paper as a mammoth 1,000-plus-page volume, or in an enhanced edition for tablets and smartphones. The digital edition is far and away the better way to read this novel; the first two books in particular are augmented by a series of short films embedded on the page, often with text overlaid, as well as animations and audio clips. For example, listening to the phone messages left by one character's mother as she tries to cajole him into co... Read Full Story
The Memory Palace by Edward Hollis
25 Aug 2013 00:39:45
It is now a museum, having been decommissioned in 1993, and is popular with ghost hunters. There have been strange sightings in the low‑ceilinged corridors and the long‑since disconnected telephones are said sometimes to ring. But you don't need to believe in the supernatural to feel the horror. The complex is redolent of cold war menace and human inadequacy. If the bomb had dropped there would not have been much hope inside or out – but I think inside, in the "female dormitory" or the tiny "sic... Read Full Story
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
25 Aug 2013 00:38:33
And indeed, the creation of one such series – a Simpsons-like animation called Figland – is the centrepiece of Wolitzer's story of the group's trajectory into adulthood. Among the teenagers who gather one summer at a camp outside New York called "Spirit in the Woods" is Ethan Figman, "thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall". Ethan is already drawing comic strips in spiral-bound notebooks that transmute the ... Read Full Story
Barnes & Noble news
22 Aug 2013 01:13:34
Barnes & Noble Inc's founder pulled the plug on his plan to buy the company's bookstores as the chain posted a deeper quarterly loss amid plunging sales of its Nook device and e-books and declining business at its stores.
Shares of the largest US bookstore chain fell 14% to $14.35 in premarket trading on Tuesday, even as the quarterly results came in slightly ahead of Wall Street expectations.
Leonard Riggio, the company's chairman, founder and top shareholder, said he has suspended his effort... Read Full Story
The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán
22 Aug 2013 01:11:56
It's not hard to see what draws the reader into this story: we begin with a young, weedy and very unworldly priest being welcomed into a world of rude moral squalor. This is a book about bourgeois virtues, genteel civility and piety clashing with earthy robustness and the sly ways of the countryman. We know what we're in for very early on when the priest, asking the way to the eponymous country estate, is told by some gnarled yokel that it is "no more 'n a dog's trot away", a measure of distance... Read Full Story
The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn
22 Aug 2013 01:09:27
Even as a child Manson was a genius at pulling strings and deflecting blame, running from trouble or flummoxing his accusers with a saintly smile. He was the bad seed turned jailbird turned spiritual guru; the catalyst for a notorious 1969 killing spree that claimed the life of the Hollywood actor Sharon Tate among numerous others, selected almost at random. But what makes Jeff Guinn's biography so rich, knotty and gripping is the way it stitches the man into his environment. It shows how the hu... Read Full Story
About famous author Elmore Leonard
21 Aug 2013 04:12:21
Although the death of the American writer Elmore Leonard – on Tuesday, aged 87, in Detroit, from complications from a recent stroke – is certainly a matter for sadness and regret, the writer would not want to be responsible for anyone speaking of the news "sadly" or "regretfully".
One of his much-circulated 10 Rules for Successful Writing – in which he distilled the approach that brought him six decades of bestsellerdom – was that dialogue should never have any descriptive modifier. "'Leonard i... Read Full Story
Andrew Marr's thoughts about Scottish independence debate
21 Aug 2013 04:10:49
It was a frail figure who gingerly made his way on to the stage at the Edinburgh international book festival, dragging his left leg as he supported himself on a stick, his left arm hanging stiffly beside him. But there could be no doubts about Andrew Marr's agility of mind. During his first public appearance since the stroke he suffered in January, he enthralled his audience with a razor-sharp, often hugely funny analysis of Scotland and the UK's recent history – and its possible future.
The br... Read Full Story
Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard
21 Aug 2013 04:08:20
When the unnamed narrator of Hunters in the Snow introduces us to her grandparents' farm, it is by way of the front porch, which doubled as her historian grandfather's study. It had a "slate roof on which a ceramic cat stalked a ceramic single-winged bird ... I do not know how the bird lost its wing." The primary themes of Daisy Hildyard's ambitious debut novel are contained in that whimsical ornament: stalking the truth about the past involves admitting that the past is incomplete, will never f... Read Full Story
A Slap in the Face by William B Irvine
20 Aug 2013 04:25:08
No such pleasures are to be found in William B Irvine's A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt – And Why They Shouldn't. Irvine is a professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and he writes as if he doesn't get out much. Certainly, his description of David Niven as a "playwright" suggests the professor is not entirely au fait with his source material. And with his endless "Let us now turn our attention tos" and "I might adds" and "As we have seens", he indulges in so much ... Read Full Story
