Poetry and the Police by Robert Darnton
30 Nov 2012 17:36:32
Thanks to Twitter and smart phones, "communication has become the most important activity of modern life." But our much vaunted information society is not new, argues Darnton, an American historian: "Information has permeated every social order since humans learned to exchange signs". Darnton turns detective in this fast-moving account of a 1749 police investigation into a poem critical of Louis XV. The "Affair of the Fourteen", as it became known, began with the arrest of a medical student who ... Read Full Story
The Great Meadow by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
30 Nov 2012 17:34:53
In the early years of the American revolution, recently wed Diony Hall leaves her Virginian homestead to start a new life in Kentucky. Here she is faced with the day-to-day struggles of frontier life: supply shortages and marauding natives; hard winters and homesickness; rival suitors and an uncertain heart. Nominated for a Pulitzer on its release in 1930, this historical romance has been out of print in the US since 1992 and is only now making its UK debut (having won Hesperus Press's "Uncover ... Read Full Story
Edna O'Brien's memoir
30 Nov 2012 17:33:43
The outstanding achievement in literary biography this year was Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor (Murray £25). Like Dickens (whose life as told by Claire Tomalin was a highlight of 2011), Paddy Leigh Fermor lived life to the limit. Before he was 30, he had not only walked from London to Constantinople, but had fallen in love with a Romanian princess and, famously, abducted a German general in the battle for Crete. Leigh Fermor is a colourful and romantic proposition, but how do you write ab... Read Full Story
St Petersburg by Heather Reyes, Marina Samsonova and James Rann
25 Nov 2012 01:59:19
Although it was only founded in 1703, St Petersburg holds "more beauty, more suffering, more dreams and nightmares than are packed into cities far more ancient", writes Reyes in the introduction to this evocative anthology. In this latest addition to the superb City-Pick series of urban literary guides, Reyes offers ample evidence to back up her claim, including many modern passages translated for this volume. Joseph Brodsky, who was born in St Petersburg, thought narcissism was the inevitable f... Read Full Story
Talking Green by Colin Ward
25 Nov 2012 01:57:38
A while ago I discovered that I have a tiny Wikipedia entry, as small as I have ever seen, whose opening description of me as "a journalist" was recently amended by a hand unknown to read "a leftwing journalist". Well, it could have been worse: if they'd really wanted to jerk my chain, they could have called me "rightwing". It is, however, a bit more complicated than that – as I was reminded when I started reading this book. And after you read it, you, too might start to wonder whether the polar... Read Full Story
The Crocodile by the Door by Selina Guinness
25 Nov 2012 01:55:58
It was extraordinary, what Ireland's economic boom did to the way people talked about land. Granted, Irish thinking on that matter was hardly in a healthy state to begin with, but by the mid-2000s, if a piece of land was not a site, it was seen by many as a wasted opportunity. At a striking moment in her new memoir – ostensibly the story of a family inheritance, but also the story of a country at a deranged moment in its history – Selina Guinness hears, on her car radio, a property developer bem... Read Full Story
Artful by Ali Smith
20 Nov 2012 00:51:06
After a year mourning the death of her lover, a woman picks up her old Penguin edition of Oliver Twist, drops herself into an armchair and starts reading. Moments later she hears someone coming up the stairs. She looks up. "It was you… your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995… you looked bruised." I can't remember the last time I felt so instantly and wholly drawn into the imagined past and present of... Read Full Story
The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller
20 Nov 2012 00:49:52
n the 1940s, Romanian Germans were ordered to help restore a damaged Soviet Union in labour camps, the theme taken by 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Müller in her latest novel, The Hunger Angel. Müller draws on interviews with survivors of the gulag to create the fictional Leo – 17, gay, and initially embracing this forced departure from his "thimble of a town". There his optimism is quickly crushed by a hunger so desperate that it transforms him in both the short and long term.
Hunger first obsesse... Read Full Story
Carry the One by Carol Anshaw
20 Nov 2012 00:46:48
Combined, the events in Carry the One could make a catalogue of tragedy. The novel begins in 1983, with five drunk and drugged-up friends accidentally killing a young girl as they drive home from a wedding in Wisconsin. What follows is 25 years chasing penance, with plenty of disappointments and a couple more deaths thrown in. And yet the novel never buckles under its weight. The gentle panorama Carol Anshaw builds from everyday vignettes makes Carry the One feel deceptively light. The narrative... Read Full Story
Every Short Story 1951-2012 by Alasdair Gray
17 Nov 2012 19:38:33
The novelist, playwright, poet, muralist, illustrator, pamphleteer and literary historian Alasdair Gray has been called all sorts of things: the 20th century's William Blake, Glasgow's Piranesi, "the greatest Scottish novelist since Walter Scott" (by Anthony Burgess), "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" (by Will Self), a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters. On the evidence of Every Short Story 1951-2012, we could slap a few more tags on t... Read Full Story
The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk
17 Nov 2012 19:35:39
Robert Oppenheimer was a complicated man. Everybody who knew him thought he was complicated; many of his friends and colleagues reckoned that he was far too complicated to figure out; some thought that he never figured himself out and that his life was one long, painful and ultimately unsuccessful experiment in personal identity, starting with toe-curling problems about sexual identity and culminating with mature, whose-side-is-he-on experiments in political identity. Oppenheimer was a theoretic... Read Full Story
A Biography by Benoît Peeters
17 Nov 2012 19:33:56
In May 1992, the dons of Cambridge University filed into their parliament to vote on whether to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, founder of so-called deconstruction. Despite a deftly managed smear campaign by the opposition, Derrida's supporters carried the day. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tried to block him in the name of rigorous scholarship had read a single book of his, or even a couple of articles. The truth is that they did not n... Read Full Story
