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Literature 1
Life Wordsmith
Image Credit : Shelfari
I had unabashedly praised Chetan Bhagat's latest offering 2 States in a previous review. I had proclaimed to be pleasantly surprised at having actually enjoyed that particu... 2
Maud Newton
I’m focused on my own writing right now, thus the dearth of longer posts, slowdown in reviewing, and trickle of remainders. I feel guilty about it, if that helps.
A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocat... 3
The Kenyon Review Blog
Some Saturdays, when our apartment has barely survived the week’s wreckage, my partner-in-domestic-crime and I spend an hour or two on what we call “Six Things.” I suggest something (wash the kitchen floor; we do it), she suggests s... 4
Maud Newton
The great Jenny Diski, upon learning that students in some writing programs are taught to end their poems with redemption, applies this formula to blogging. 5
Literary Kicks
Here's the first great book of the new decade. Just Kids by Patti Smith is a major work, an act of creative discovery, and a surprising new step in its author's riveting career.
Was there every any doubt that Patti Smith could writ... 6
PhiloBiblos
Ian Sansom's fourth installment in his Mobile Library Mystery series is The Bad Book Affair (Harper, 2010). I rather wish Sansom would just drop the mystery business, since as in prior installments the mystery in question wasn't muc... 7
The Kenyon Review Blog
Necco phased out the “Bite Me” message on their Sweethearts® Conversation Hearts due to “[consumer complaints] that it was a bit sexually suggestive.” It shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the “Bite Me” hearts weren’t a chee... 8
Maud Newton
Literature Nobel laureate Herta Müller recommends Liu Xiaobo, writer, president of Chinese PEN, and co-founder of Charter 08, for the Nobel Peace Prize. 9
Conversational Reading
Tattoo: A Pepe Carvalho Mystery Reviewed @ TQCThe latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is Ahmad Saidullah’s critique of Tattoo: A Pepe Carvalho Mystery by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, just published in English by Serpent’s Tail.... 10
Conversational Reading
Published Off the RecordWyatt Mason’s adulatory essay on Leonard Michaels (the “contemporary American writer I most admired”) offers a startling precis of how much the where and who of an author’s publication matters:
When Michaels’... 11
The Reading Experience
Although I have read Rabbit, Run at least four times, I have read the other Rabbit books by John Updike only once. While I thought Rabbit is Rich was worth reading, the other two were tepid and lackluster, period pieces... 12
The Mumpsimus
Among the great American satirical fictioneers of the last hundred years or so -- and Americans often tend to be satirical fictioneers, even when they're not trying to be, because it's hard to write about the vast, paradoxical, beau... 13
The Literary Saloon
Another century-mark at the complete review -- there are now (over) 2400 reviews -- and so it's time for another (statistical) look at what was reviewed in the last batch of a hundred.
Once again, I tallied up how ma... 14
The Literary Saloon
As Middle East Online reports, the winners in two of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award categories have been announced -- and I like the way they put it:
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award for "Literature" went this year to Hafnaoui Baa... 15
The Literary Saloon
The books aren't very literary, but still, it's good to hear that, as Lee Cataluna reports in the Honolulu Advertiser, Books in Hawaiian language fill a void.... 16
Literary Kicks
Don DeLillo's been on my mind lately. I dug up his 1985 classic White Noise two weeks ago after finding my youngest daughter listening to an indie band called, of all things, Airborne Toxic Event. Rereading from the beginning, I wa... 17
Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes
My review of Don DeLillo’s new short novel, Point Omega, is in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Here’s the kicker:
Like much of DeLillo’s work, “Point Omega” is concerned with how much we’re doing to do ourselves in. But unlike the... 18
PhiloBiblos
- The San Francisco book fair is this weekend: Ian's offering dispatches from the floor, and you can also follow along with him on Twitter.- 2009 was a good year for odd book titles, apparently. The Bookseller's "Oddest Book Title o... 19
The Literary Saloon
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Ian McEwan's forthcoming (and much-anticipated) Solar.
Interesting to note that both McEwan and Martin Amis (in his just-published (in the UK ...) The P... 20
The Literary Saloon
In Today's Zamaan they report on the new volume, 'In Jail with Nazım Hikmet' by Orhan Kemal and Bengisu Rona... |
New York Times Book Review National Book Award The Quarterly Conversation David Foster Wallace York Public Library Don DeLillo Chronicle of Higher Education Raymond Carver John Updike The Nobel Prize Philip Roth Joyce Carol Oates Open Letters Monthly Words Without Borders Tin House Bonnie Jo Campbell James Wood Original of Laura Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Lost Symbol 
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