Oscar and Lucinda by Peter CareyRead about another novel on the list.
It is easier to make non-consummation credible if you set the action in the past (see above). The "lovers" in Carey's novel, set in Victorian England and Australia, are a clergyman and a proto-feminist, making their union even more difficult to achieve.
“If we took it all personally,” Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner tells his rookie NYPD partner, “there’s no way we could do the job.”Learn more about the author and his work at Gabriel Cohen's website.
Very soon, though, that notion gets shot to hell, as the deeply principled cop hears about the murder of an old Russian friend on Neptune Avenue---and then is disturbed to find himself increasingly drawn to the man’s stunning widow, Eugenia. She informs Jack of her husband’s troubles with Semyon Balakutis, a local nightclub operator and extortionist. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger in central Brooklyn is killing young women and posing them as suicides.
From the Russian emigré community of Brighton Beach to the racially charged neighborhood of Crown Heights, from the crimes of World War II to the harshness of his own father, Jack’s latest cases plunge him deep into the roots of why men act in anger---and into the eternal mystery of love.
Gabriel Cohen stuns in this riveting third addition to the Brooklyn-set series.
After the hardcover of Standing Still came out, and good reviews started popping up, my L.A. agent called me with what I like to call a “Hollywood review” (i.e. something that sounds great but means nothing.) “Mel Gibson loves it and wants to direct Nicole Kidman in it because she’s looking to star in a juicy psychological thriller after giving birth.” Ooooh! Who needs to be reviewed by The New York Times! Nicole & Mel called me juicy!Read an excerpt and watch the trailer for Standing Still at Kelly Simmons' website and blog.
The next week, more exciting news: “Gus Van Sant is going to look at it as soon as he’s done editing Milk.” My favorite director? Ready to read it as soon as he decides how long to hold the close up of James Franco & Sean Penn? Nirvana!
Then...[read on]
Halfling Tildi Summerbee led a typical, unexciting life, tending the house for her brothers while they managed the family farm...until she was forced to assume the identity of her recently deceased brother and accept his position as apprentice to a great wizard.Read an excerpt from A Forthcoming Wizard, and visit Jody Lynn Nye's homepage.
Now she is on an important quest where the lessons of her apprenticeship pale in comparison to those learned in life-or-death situations. She has become the guardian of a very special book that can alter everything in existence… a race of centaurs gone with an editor’s pen, a mountain range flattened with a revised rune, and life as Tildi has known it changed in the blink of an eye.
Gone are her preconceptions of society and order.
Gone are her trusting ways and belief in her superiors’ honesty.
But also gone is the shrinking violet smallfolk who masqueraded as a boy to secure an apprenticeship.
Tildi has changed too, and she realizes that the fate of the world rests in her hands.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nicholas Rombes, whose books include Cinema in the Digital Age (Wallflower Press / Columbia University Press) and the forthcoming A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982, (Continuum, June 2009. He is professor and Chair of English at the University of Detroit Mercy.I used to make distinctions between academic and non-academic reading, but not any more. Over the past few years, I've found that most all good writing, on some level, is a form of theory, whether it be Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pierre, or Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Both of those books, in particular, are novels, but also theories about the forging together of arbitrary signs in order to create the illusion of reality. But right now, I'm still working my way—in fits and starts—through William T. Vollmann's mammoth, seven-volume study of violeVisit Nicholas Rombes's websites for Cinema in the Digital Age and A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982.nce Rising Up and Rising Down, published in 2003 by McSweeney's books. Right now I'm on "The Moral Calculus" Vollmann's recklessly, brutally, not-so-funny attempt to logically, empirically, almost mathematically answer the question, "When is Violence Justified?" Sections include "When is Violent Defense of Honor Justified?" and "When is Violent Defense of Race and Culture Justified?" Vollmann is one of those writers tagged as "postmodern" in the sense that his excessiveness seems to be a strategy for coping with and encompassing the sheer size of reality.
This may seem like a silly thing to say, I know, for...[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterward, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke -- the legendary film director John Huston -- with the words, "This is your father."Read an excerpt from Love Child, and learn more about the book and author at Allegra Huston's website.
So began an extraordinary odyssey: from the magical Huston estate in Ireland to the Long Island suburbs to a hidden paradise in Mexico -- and, at the side of her older sister, Anjelica, into the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, and Marlon Brando. Allegra's is the penetrating gaze of an outsider never quite sure if she belongs in this rarefied world and of a motherless child trying to make sense of her famous, fragmented family. Then, at the age of twelve, Allegra's precarious sense of self was shattered when she was, once more, introduced to her father -- her real one this time, the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich.
At the heart of Love Child is Allegra's search through the unreliable certainties of memory for the widely adored mother she never knew -- the ghost who shadowed her childhood and left her in a web of awkward and unwelcome truths. With clear-eyed tenderness, Allegra tells of how she forged bonds with both her famous fathers, transforming her mother's difficult legacy into a hard-won blessing. Beautifully written and forensically honest, Love Child is a seductive insight into one of Hollywood's great dynasties and the story of how, in a family that defied convention, one woman found her balance on the shifting sands of conflicting loyalties.
One item on the list:Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too by Edward GoreyRead about another title on Murray's list.
No such list could begin without Gorey. If you want the lot in paperback there is nothing wrong with these two collections, although the individual Bloomsbury volumes are hard to resist. Fall in love with 'The Uninvited Guest', and for all visiting children leave out 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies': "M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Neville who died of ennui ... ". See also Strulwwelpeter by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (my mother's favourite), Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, and anything by David Shrigley.
.Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth, the man is a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security. What follows is a riveting story of two quixotic men who stalk each other toward a bloody showdown -- a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an aging water park.Read an excerpt from the novel and learn more about Jeffrey Rotter at The Museum of the Aquatic Ape.
The Unknown Knowns -- its title is a reference to a quote from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- is a brilliant send-up of the insidious language and sometimes tragically comic focus of our country's Homeland Security Department. Combining the social satire of Kurt Vonnegut with the paranoid delusions of Thomas Pynchon, Rotter takes everyday domestic fixations and turns them into a hilarious assessment of the human condition. Fresh, imaginative, and deft, The Unknown Knowns marks the arrival of a unique new voice in literary fiction.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Christopher Conlon, author of three books of poems, two collections of stories, and a novel, Midnight on Mourn Street, which has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.There are four books currently on my coffee table. (Though since I don't drink coffee, it's really a tea table.)Visit Christopher Conlon's website and blog.
....[T]wo in the stack, Endpoint and Collected Poems, are both by John Updike, a writer whose work has never, until recently, done much for me. I used to read his short stories when they appeared in The New Yorker, but rarely found myself affected by them; a couple of stabs at his novels left me cold. But in the past couple of years Updike published in various magazines some poems which, I was surprised to discover, moved me; so when I saw his latest (and last) verse collection in a bookstore, Endpoint, I picked it up--and promptly fell in love with the urbane tone, the gentle melancholy, the witty language. It inspired me to also get his Collected Poems, and reading through it has confirmed to me that Updike was, and is, woefully undervalued as a poet....[read on]
Casino Royale by Ian FlemingRead about another flogging on Mullan's list.
The villainous, sadistic Le Chiffre is bent on nastiness to James Bond not only because he is a British agent but also because he has beaten him at baccarat. His men capture Bond and take him to his villa, where he tortures him with a cane carpet beater. Fleming is clinically precise about the effects.
No books have been more feared than grimoires, and no books have been more valued and revered. In Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies illuminates the many fascinating forms these recondite books have taken and exactly what these books held.Learn more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.
At their most benign, these repositories of forbidden knowledge revealed how to make powerful talismans and protective amulets, and provided charms and conjurations for healing illness, finding love, and warding off evil. But other books promised the power to control innocent victims, even to call up the devil. Davies traces the history of this remarkably resilient and adaptable genre, from the ancient Middle East to modern America, offering a new perspective on the fundamental developments of western civilization over the past two thousand years. Grimoires shows the influence magic and magical writing has had on the cultures of the world, richly demonstrating the role they have played in the spread of Christianity, the growth of literacy, and the influence of western traditions from colonial times to the present. Through his enlightening and extraordinary account, we see how these secret books link Chicago to ancient Egypt, Germany to Jamaica, and Norway to Bolivia, and grasp how the beliefs of Alpine farmers became part of the Rastafarian movement, how a Swede became the most powerful wizard in early America, and how a poor laborer from Ohio became a notorious villain in his own country and a mythical spirit in the Caribbean.
Despite religious condemnation and laws barring their use, the grimoire has survived to the present day, and not just in Harry Potter films and Broadway's Wicked. Here is a lively and informative history of a genre that holds a powerful fascination for countless readers of the occult.
About the book, from the publisher:Ray and his best friend, Manny, close ever since they met in juvie almost twenty years ago, have a great scam going: With a couple of fake badges and some DEA windbreakers they found at a secondhand store, they pose as federal agents and rip off small-time drug dealers, taking their money and drugs and disappearing before anyone is the wiser. It’s the perfect sting: the dealers they target are too small to look for revenge and too guilty to call the police, nobody has to die, nobody innocent gets hurt, and Ray and Manny score plenty.Learn more about the book and author at Dennis Tafoya's website.
But it can’t last forever. Eventually, they choose the wrong mark and walk out with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a heavy hitter, who is more than willing to kill to get his money back, is coming after them. Now Ray couldn’t care less about the score. He wants out---out of the scam, out of a life he feels like he never chose. Whether the victim of his latest job---not to mention his partner---will let him is another question entirely.
Dennis Tafoya brings a rich, passionate, and accomplished new voice to the explosive story of a small-time crook with everything to lose in Dope Thief, his outstanding hardboiled debut.
He told Newsweek about his five most essential books. And discussed two related issues:A BOOK I FREQUENTLY RETURN TO: "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway. Honest, wounded, naked, yet ironic.Read about Dubus' most essential books list.
A BOOK YOU HOPE TO HAVE PARENTS READ THEIR CHILDREN: "Night Cars" by Teddy Jam and Eric Beddows. Written in the voice of a dream, one you have while drifting off in a safe, warm place.
The entry begins: I would love to see this book become a movie, because it really is suited to the big screen. It involves a hostage situation, which is always a drama mine, and intense, attractive characters. But the setting is even more perfect: the Cleveland Federal Reserve building, built from marble and glass in 1923, and the Cleveland Public Library, built…I don’t know when, but it’s old. Though actually the section of building used in this tale—directly across from the Fed—is quite a bit newer, but I’ll gloss over that part. It’s also set in summer, which means Cleveland will look clean and attractive minus its winter coating of slush.Learn more about Takeover and the author at Lisa Black's website.
Anyway, casting: My heroine Theresa MacLean is always played by Julianne Moore. I don’t know if it’s the red hair or the way she’s always serious without being humorless, but Julianne Moore is right in every way. The right age, the right look, the right attitude. You can imagine her handling just about anything, yet she also seems realistic when performing the more mundane tasks of life like filling out evidence slips or scraping red tape off the booking counter. I can’t picture, say, Angelina Jolie filling out evidence slips. Theresa is fortyish, so the other leads have to be about the same age. Don’t torment me by surrounding my alter ego with handsome men young enough to be, if not her sons, then kids she used to babysit. I get enough of that anguish from prime time TV.
My hostage negotiator, Chris Cavanaugh, is...[read on]
"Kargman...went for Wall Street’s jugular in her latest work. The delightful—if frighteningly pampered—divorcée protagonist Holly finds a happier life outside the fiscal shallows after busting her naughty husband for having an affair with a Williamsburg girl."Find out about one of Kargman's literary enthusiasms at Writers Read: Jill Kargman.
--Vanity Fair
A "lively chronicle of a queen of ka-ching who ditches her hedge fund manager hubby.... Effervescent Holly's romp through wealthy Manhattan is a gleeful little bonbon."
--Publishers Weekly
Kargman "describes a world of unimaginable extravagances, but the novel’s true heart is Holly and Kiki’s unwavering friendship. Readers will also appreciate an epilogue that addresses the current economic woes and gives the greedy hedge funders their comeuppance."
--Booklist
About the book, from the publisher:Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a "pirate code"? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits.Read an excerpt from The Invisible Hook, and learn more about the author and his work at Peter T. Leeson's website and his group blog, The Austrian Economists.
The Invisible Hook looks at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how pirates' search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices. Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy--a model they adopted more than fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers' compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality. Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice--their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order. Pirates proved that anarchy could be organized.
Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history's most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates' trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world.
One title on her list:The Fifth ChildRead about Number One on Schwartz's list.
by Doris Lessing
Knopf, 1983
Doris Lessing has always had her eye on the big picture -- so big that in some of her later works she has ventured into outer space. Her novella "The Fifth Child" is set firmly on Earth but continues Lessing's lifelong preoccupation: Whither humanity? Part fable, part cautionary tale, part social satire, it tells of a self-satisfied young couple who decide to rear a large family. All goes according to plan until the fifth pregnancy. Even in utero, Ben is abnormally restless; at birth, he resembles a goblin. Before long, his malice and violence become a danger to his siblings. He's not quite human, his once smug parents are forced to admit, but a throwback to a primitive era -- a wayward gene erupting into cozy upper-middle-class life. This chilling tale of a family's destruction by the evil lurking within is unforgettable, written in ink laced with acid.
Two sisters discover passion during the War of the Roses—one in the arms of the king, the other in the world of silkBrowse inside Figures in Silk, and learn more about the author and her work at Vanora Bennett's website.
From the author of the acclaimed novel Portrait of an Unknown Woman comes an epic tale of love and intrigue. The year is 1471. Edward IV, who won the throne with the help of his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is restoring law and order after years of war. Under Edward IV, life in England begins to improve. Business is booming once more and the printing and silk industries prosper in London.
When silk merchant John Lambert marries off his two beautiful daughters, their fortunes are forever changed. Elder daughter Jane Shore begins a notorious liaison with the king while industrious and clever Isabel finds herself married into the house of Claver, a wealthy silk dynasty. Fate delivers Isabel a challenge when her new husband is killed and she is forced into apprenticeship to her mother-in-law, Alice Claver.
It is from Alice Claver that Isabel learns to love silk and the exotic and passionate fabrics from Italy, Persia, Spain, Tunisia, and beyond. Isabel learns to make her way in this new world of silk—to find friends and enemies—and she strikes an alliance with her sister's lover, King Edward IV, that will bring the secrets of silk-making to London. As Isabel grows in power and her plan for a silk industry run by Englishwomen is set into motion, the political landscape shifts in dangerous ways. One sister will fall as the other rises and choices must be made that will change their lives forever.
One paragraph from his entry: The most extraordinary book I’ve picked up lately is a graphic novel by an Italian artist named Gipi. The book (his second) is called Garage Band, and it follows a teenage band as they settle in to and then lose their practice space. The book is quiet but the story is beautifully told in spare sentences and fluid ink-and-water color drawings that capture a bit of the band’s rambunctiousness.[read on]Ari Y. Kelman is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Learn more about Station Identification at the University of California Press website, and visit Ari Y. Kelman's faculty webpage."Station Identification represents a valuable and unique contribution to radio studies scholarship and to the cultural history of Yiddish in the United States. Ari Y. Kelman unearths the hitherto forgotten 'acoustic community' of Yiddish radio and demonstrates with impressive archival research that the story of Yiddish radio in the U.S. is inextricably woven together with the origins of American broadcasting. Uncanny and haimish, local and national, bilingual and ambivalent, Yiddish radio, like much early broadcasting, is the story of an audience tuning in to hear voices like their own."
—Jason Loviglio, author of Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy
A wide-ranging and delightful narrative history of the celebrated plant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth-century AmericaRead more about the book and author at the official The Garden of Invention website.
A century ago, Luther Burbank was the most famous gardener on the planet. His name was inseparable from a cornucopia of new and improved plants—fruits, nuts, vegetables, and flowers—for both home gardens and commercial farms and orchards. At a time when the science of genetics was in its infancy and agriculture was often a perilous combination of guess work and luck, many people wanted a piece of the man they called the Wizard of Santa Rosa.
As the United States moved from a nation of farms to a nation of city dwellers, the people behind the new products that transformed daily life were admired with a fervor that is not accorded to their present-day counterparts. Everyone knew and marveled at Samuel Morse’s telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and Thomas Edison’s electric light. And like these other great American inventors, Burbank was revered as an example of the best tradition of American originality, ingenuity, and perseverance. Burbank had learned the secret of teaching nature to perform for man, breeding and crossbreeding ordinary plants from farm and garden until they were tastier, hardier, and more productive than ever before.
The Garden of Invention is neither an encyclopedia nor a biography. Rather, Jane S. Smith, a noted cultural historian, highlights significant moments in Burbank’s life (itself a fascinating story) and uses them to explore larger trends that he embodied and, in some cases, shaped. The Garden of Invention revisits the early years of bioengineering, when plant inventors were popular heroes and the public clamored for new varieties that would extend seasons, increase yields, look beautiful, or simply be wonderfully different from anything seen before.
The road from the nineteenth-century farm to twenty-first-century agribusiness is full of twists and turns, of course, but a good part of it passed straight through Luther Burbank’s garden. The Garden of Invention is a colorful and engrossing examination of the intersection of gardening, science, and business in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression.
The jet age began in 1939 with the brief hop of a secret German airplane. Seventy years later, the entire world depends upon the jet engine in every sphere - political, military, economic, and social. In Hypersonic Thunder, Walter Boyne weaves an intricate story of how the jet engine changed aeronautics and astronautics, pushing the frontiers of flight forward and permitting humankind to enter the space age.Visit Walter J. Boyne's website.
Drawing on his knowledge of the period, Boyne paints a gripping picture of jet aviation from the brilliant supersonic Concorde to the coming challenges of hypersonic flight. Using the fictional Shannons as a vehicle, the author ranges the world of aviation, combining the triumphs and tragedies of great aviation companies with the familiar conflicts of family life. All of the great names of aeronautics and astronautics appear here as they did on the historic scene, including such luminaries as Howard Hughes, Kelly Johnson, Burt Rutan, and Steve Fossett.
The book thunders with the clash of combat, ranging from the courageous fights of the Israeli Air Force down through the raid on Libya, Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, and, most important the ongoing war on terror. And space is not neglected, as Boyne covers everything from Skylab and the Space Shuttle, with its great achievements and terrible tragedies, to the International Space Station.
One title on the list:Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dover, $4).Read about another work on Toback's list.
In my screenplay for The Gambler, I gave college professor Axel Freed (James Caan) the chance to read from and analyze Dostoyevsky’s dark, hilarious novella, which advances the notion that man maintains his humanity by reserving the right to insist that two and two equal five precisely because it has been rationally proved that two and two equal four. Freed’s lecture sets the stage for his dual nature—academic and compulsive gambler.
The Big O by Declan BurkeRead about Number One on McGilloway's list.
Declan Burke is single-handedly supporting Irish crime fiction at his site www.crimealwayspays.blogspot.combut he is also a terrific crime writer himself. The Big O charts the relationship of armed robber Karen and her new lover Ray. Throw in an ex-prisoner looking to set up a support group and a wolf called Anna and you have some sense of a novel which recalls Elmore Leonard at his best.
Eleanor Trewynn is a widow of some years living in Port Mabyn, a small fishing village in Cornwall, England. In her younger days, she traveled the exotic parts of the world with her husband. These days, she’s retired and founded the local charity shop. Her niece, Megan Pencarrow, transferred nearby, and was recently promoted to the rank of Detective Sargent. Perhaps the only downside is that she is now working for a DI who doesn’t approve of women on the police force and who really doesn’t much approve of Megan’s aunt Eleanor, as she is something of a thorn in his rather substantial side.Visit Carola Dunn's website and Facebook page, and her group blog, The Lady Killers.
All of these factors collide when, the day after collecting donations, Eleanor and the vicar’s wife find the dead body of a longhaired, scruffy-looking youth hidden in the stockroom of the charity shop. Then they discover that some donated jewelry thought to be fake is actually very real, very expensive, and the haul from a violent robbery in London. Making matters more complex, the corpse found in the storeroom is apparently not one of the robbers. Manna from Hades is a confounding case of daring theft, doublecross, and a wily older woman confronted by a case of murder most foul.
Beginning with the Scientific Revolution and concluding with today's terrorist networks, Antoine J. Bousquet advances a novel history of scientific methodology in the context of the battlefield. For centuries, scientific conceptual frameworks have been applied to theories of war, particularly with the invention of such influential technologies as the clock, the engine, and the computer. Conversely, many scientific developments have been stimulated or conditioned by the experience of war, especially in the wake of the unprecedented technological and industrial effort of World War II.Learn more about The Scientific Way of Warfare at the Columbia University Press website, and visit Antoine Bousquet's faculty webpage at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Marked by an increasingly tight symbiosis between technology, science, and conflict, the constitution and perpetuation of this scientific way of warfare are best understood as an attempt by the state to turn violent aggression into a rational instrument of policy. In his study, Bousquet explores the relative benefits (such a unique chain of command to safeguard the use of nuclear weapons) and decentralizing (such as the flexible networks that connect insurgents) military affairs. He then follows with specific scientific approaches to war: mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and "chaoplexic," a network-centric theory allied with the non-linear sciences.
While Easy Innocence is the debut of a new series, its protagonist, former cop turned PI Georgia Davis, gets around. She made her first appearance in my second Ellie Foreman book, A Picture of Guilt, but I’d written a short story about her prior to that. In fact, she first came to me before I was published, when I was writing what I euphemistically call one of my “practice novels.” Georgia is tough, guarded, and independent. She keeps people at a distance. She doesn’t want you to know her too well. And she doesn’t take **** from anyone.Easy Innocence is a spin-off from the Ellie Foreman series. It is a dark, disturbing tale about high school girls and what they are doing when they're not adequately supervised. It came out of Hellmann's experience with her own daughter, and what she imagined as "every mother's nightmare."
The other thing to keep in mind is that show business runs through my family like a bad case of chicken pox. One of my nieces is an actress, and I originally based Georgia’s physical appearance on her. At the moment, though, she’s busy raising her two sons, so I see several other possibilities. Charlize Theron would make an excellent Georgia. So would Kate Hudson. Reese Witherspoon, if she was able to play against type, might work also.
The other dominant female in Easy Innocence is Andrea Walcher, the mother of 17-year-old Lauren. I think...[read on]
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Dani Kollin, co-author of The Unincorporated Man.Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed. I'd been meaning to get to a Le Guin book for some time. When you hang in my circles certain names keep cropping up and hers was one of them. This Hugo-award winning book, written in the 70's attempts to paint a portrait of Capitalism vs Communism via two worlds separated by mere hundreds of thousands of miles (Think, Moon is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein but switch the 'isms'). First the negative: I'm finding the book a bit of a slog. I care not one iota about the protagonist (Shevek) and to be perfectly honest find the world he walks through to be rather droll. To be fair this may be backwards myopia, as I'm reading it through the lens of a new millennia as opposed to the very pressing concerns of that time (the Soviet Union vs the U.S.). Still, there were plenty of other books that took Communism to task and yet still managed to maintain a plot structure that was both compelling and addictive. This book, IMHO, is not one of them. So why am I reading it to the end? Because Ms. LeGuin is a writer's writer andVisit Dani Kollin's blog and The Unincorporated Man website.without a doubt one of the most beautiful and poetic authors I've ever had the pleasure of reading (in fact, comparable to Bradbury in her prose). I find myself re-reading passages because they've been set up and crafted so eloquently. In fact I've spent an inordinate amount of time copying my favorite passages and sentences to a word doc so that when I write to a particular emotion or description I have something to look at and aspire towards. Here's one brief example in which she describes an aspect of the protagonist: "He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambience, which only great strength or great devotion could withstand." What an incredible description. What an incredible writer.[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:Dobson, New York, 1905.Read an excerpt from In the Shadow of Gotham, and learn more about the book and author at Stefanie Pintoff's website.
Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancée in the General Slocum ferry disaster—a thousand perished on that summer day in 1904 when an onboard fire burned the boat down in the waters of the East River. Still reeling from the tragedy, Ziele transferred to a police department north of New York, to escape the city and all the memories it conjured.
But only a few months into his new life in a quiet country town, he’s faced with the most shocking homicide of his career to date: Young Sarah Wingate has been brutally murdered in her own bedroom in the middle of an otherwise calm and quiet winter afternoon. After just one day of investigation, Simon’s contacted by Columbia University’s noted criminologist Alistair Sinclair, who offers a startling claim about one of his patients, Michael Fromley—that the facts of the murder bear an uncanny resemblance to Fromley’s deranged mutterings.
But what would have led Fromley, with his history of violent behavior and brutal fantasies, to seek out Sarah, a notable mathematics student and a proper young lady who has little in common with his previous targets? Is Fromley really a murderer, or is someone mimicking him?
This is what Simon Ziele must find out, with the help of the brilliant but self-interested Alistair Sinclair—before the killer strikes again.
With this taut, atmospheric, and original story of a haunted man who must search for a killer while on the run from his own demons, Stefanie Pintoff’s In the Shadow of Gotham marks the debut of an outstanding new talent, the inaugural winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America Best First Crime Novel Competition.
BookFinder.com's research came up with "the top 10 most sought-after out of print books in America in 2008."Legally Sane (1972) by Jon K. Hahn with Harold C. McKenneyRead about another title on the list.
An investigation of an international killing spree and the chilling accounts of a psychopathic murderer
Possession, by AS ByattRead about another lock of hair on Mullan's list.
Byatt knows the Victorians liked their locks, and makes her plot turn on the discovery of a lock of hair in a grave. In the box that was buried with the great poet Randolph Ash, the eager researchers discover a bundle of letters, a bracelet and "a blue envelope containing a long thread of very finely plaited pale hair". They are sure they know whose hair it is, but the novel finally turns on the fact that they misidentify it.
About the book, from the publisher:In AD 200, the Roman Empire seemed unassailable. Its vast territory accounted for most of the known world. By the end of the fifth century, Roman rule had vanished in western Europe and much of northern Africa, and only a shrunken Eastern Empire remained. What accounts for this improbable decline? Here, Adrian Goldsworthy applies the scholarship, perspective, and narrative skill that defined his monumental Caesar to address perhaps the greatest of all historical questions—how Rome fell.Read an excerpt from How Rome Fell, and learn more about the book and author at Adrian Goldsworthy's website.
It was a period of remarkable personalities, from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius to emperors like Diocletian, who portrayed themselves as tough, even brutal, soldiers. It was a time of revolutionary ideas, especially in religion, as Christianity went from persecuted sect to the religion of state and emperors. Goldsworthy pays particular attention to the willingness of Roman soldiers to fight and kill each other. Ultimately, this is the story of how an empire without a serious rival rotted from within, its rulers and institutions putting short-term ambition and personal survival over the wider good of the state.
A mesmerizing novel about memory, guilt, power, and violenceLearn more about the book and author at J. Robert Lennon's website.
In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.” So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the owner is blacked out.
Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest—lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer—that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America’s current military misadventures—and Loesch’s secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what—and who—might lie at the heart of Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, “contains enough electricity to light up the country.”
Last spring I had the good fortune to interview James Beard Award-winning Chef Donald Link for the inaugural post of the "Dining with Bacchus" blog.Link has also just finished a cookbook, due out in Spring 2009. The book is a compilation of family recipes rather than a restaurant cookbook. The chef developed these recipes at home: no cheating with restaurant cookware, super-hot stoves, and other accessories that amateur cooks usually lack. The only drawback to the process, Link says, is not having someone to wash the dishes. (He hates washing dishes.Read the complete story of my visit to Link's flagship restaurant, Herbsaint.And waiting tables. He's done enough of both jobs in the climb to his current status.) Although the publisher is marketing the book as "real Cajun and rustic home cooking," the chef resists the "real" tag: he says he's uncomfortable defining "Cajun" for everyone.
Link says he made an extra effort to make the recipes user friendly. Instead of merely stating how long a dish should cook and at what temperature, he calls, for example, for "cooking for ten minutes until the top bubbles" or "until the sides brown."
Penelope Fizergerald’s droll masterpiece from the 1970s, still in-print I think – The Bookshop – is a bracing reminder, all the more crucial now, of the disruptive, essential power of books. I reread it often.[read on]Read an excerpt from Zipperstein's Rosenfeld’s Lives, and discover more about the book at the Yale University Press website.
Steven J. Zipperstein’s is the Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford, and has just spent two years at Harvard. He has written widely on Russian and East European Jewish history, and among his books are histories of the Jews of Odessa, and a biography of the leading intellectual of Zionism who was also its prime internal critic in the movement’s formative years, the essayist Ahad Ha’am. Zipperstein is now at work on a cultural history of Russian Jewry for Houghton Mifflin and Company.
JK Rowling: Harry PotterRead about another title on the list.
Rowling's reluctance to grant interviews as well as her donations to the Labour party has meant that the creator of Harry Potter has become an easy target - so it seems pertinent to remember that a considerable percentage of Rowling's income has helped to support charities such as Comic Relief, One Parent Families and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain. Do you bookstealers feel guilty yet?
About the book, from the publisher:Youssef el-Mekki, a young man of nineteen, is living with his mother in the slums of Casablanca when he discovers that the father he believed to be dead is, in fact, alive and eager to befriend and support him. Leaving his mother behind, Youssef assumes a life he could only dream of: a famous and influential father, his own penthouse apartment, and all the luxuries associated with his new status. His future appears assured until an abrupt reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends, where a fringe Islamic group, known simply as the Party, has set up its headquarters.Read an excerpt from Secret Son, and learn more about the novel and author at Laila Lalami's website and blog.
In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami's powerful first novel explores the struggle for identity, the need for family, and the desperation that overtakes ordinary lives in a country divided by class, politics, and religion.
What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?Hilarious, brilliant: read "Fatso" online or in Keret's collection, The Nimrod Flipout.
Etgar Keret’s three-page story “Fatso”, about a guy whose girlfriend turns into a cheerful, chubby man every night. It still makes me laugh when I think of it.
The English Patient by Michael OndaatjeRead about another title on Mullan's list.
More passion bred by the desert. "Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said." The mysterious character of the novel's title is a desert explorer pursuing a personal obsession. "There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the western world towards the desert for hundreds of years." This list would tell us otherwise.
About the book, from the publisher:Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine.Read an excerpt from Andean Cocaine, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well--for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers.
Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.
In this latest internationally bestselling thriller from David Rollins, author of The Death Trust, a bizarre murder leads an ex–Air Force special investigator into a shadow world of conspiracy, cover-up, and military secrecy where the difference between friend or foe is thin as…Read an excerpt from A Knife Edge and learn more about the book and author at David Rollins' website.
A scientist meets a grisly end when he falls from a military research ship and is attacked by a two-ton white shark off the Japanese coast. By the time Special Investigator Vin Cooper reaches the scene, there’s literally very little left to prove that the death wasn’t an accident. But Cooper’s instincts tell him that he’s looking at murder and that in assigning him to this case someone might just as well have shoved him, too, into shark-infested waters.
What kind of top secret project could the military be engaged in that would require the services of a foremost marine biologist and a genetic researcher? The possibilities are ominous, but not as ominous as the truth. And then the unthinkable tragedy that everyone feared since 9/11 explodes with a terrifying sense of déjà vu—in San Francisco.
Suddenly, with a second scientist presumed dead, an unidentified charred body in the morgue, and the “accidental” parachute death of a friend in a Florida training field, Cooper is following a trail as narrow and as dangerous as a knife-edge—a trail that leads to what we all fear most: a secret “government” within our government whose sworn duty is to kill anyone who opposes them.
The current featured contributor at Writer's Read: Joshua Fogel, Canada Research Chair in Chinese history at York University in Toronto. He has taught previously at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Ai Ssu-chi's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit, and the recently published Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time.When not reading in my field, I have recently read a spate of novels by Aharon AppelfeldRead Joshua Fogel's biography at Sino-Japanese Studies.in English translation. I picked up a few of his novellas some years back but found them almost too spare. I think I got the point—they’re almost all about the Holocaust in one way or another—and I attributed the underwriting to the fact that he only began to learn Hebrew after the war in his teenage years. Then, I read his memoir, The Story of a Life, about his life before and during the war in Bukovina and Ukraine and his first decades of adjustment in Israel after the war. It is a masterpiece, and clearly language is not a problem, though it is something he is consumed with.[read on]
Contrarian that I am, I don’t like to tell people who I see in the roles of my protagonists, homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson and FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin. So I reached out to my friends and fans, asked their opinion. The responses I received were fascinating. No one saw the characters the same way. I love that. My goal as a writer is to create a world for you, the reader, to escape into. I’ll give enough detail to get you going, but it’s YOUR imagination that fills in the blanks. That’s how I like to read, and that method has colored my writing.J.T. Ellison is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Taylor Jackson series, including All the Pretty Girls, 14, Judas Kiss and the forthcoming
Here are the nominees to play Taylor Jackson – my tall, honey-haired, gray-eyed, tough as nails cop:...[read on]
Edge of Black. She was recently named “Best Mystery/Thriller Writer of 2008” by the Nashville Scene.
Language in DangerRead about Number One on Quinion's list.
by Andrew Dalby
Columbia University, 2003
Languages not only change, they also die: World-wide, a language vanishes on average every two weeks. Andrew Dalby argues that each disappearance diminishes us, because a language encapsulates local knowledge and ways of looking at the human condition that die with the last speaker. Stronger languages squeeze out others: An early example is the language extinction that occurred around the Mediterranean in classical times, through the rise of Latin. Closer to our own time, minority languages -- Irish, Welsh, Native American and Australian tongues -- were banned in school to force minority groups to speak the language of the majority. The mood is now swinging toward encouraging minority languages, and some of those in danger may be saved. Dalby's engrossing account documents endangered languages throughout the world.
For fans of Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide and zombie aficionados everywhere, a hilarious debut novel about life (and love) after death.Read Chapter 1 from Breathers, and learn more about the book and author at the Undead Anonymous website and Scott Browne's LiveJournal and MySpace page.
Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car-crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket to the SPCA to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere.
Darkly funny, surprisingly touching, and gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader, Breathers is a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com, for short) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and clamoring for more.
He named his favorite story collections for The Week. One title on the list:Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver (Vintage, $15).Read about another book on McInerney's list.
Carver’s first collection, with its pared-down, colloquial language and its working-class settings, almost single-handedly revivified realism, and the short story itself, when it appeared in 1976. It remains astonishingly fresh and powerful to this day. Like Hemingway, Carver stripped away the cobwebs and taught us a new way to see and hear the world around us.
About the book, from the publisher:In a single moment, everything changes. Seventeen year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall riding along the snow-wet Oregon road with her family. Then, in a blink, she finds herself watching as her own damaged body is taken from the wreck...Read an excerpt from If I Stay, and learn more about the book and author at Gayle Forman's website and blog.
A sophisticated, layered, and heartachingly beautiful story about the power of family and friends, the choices we all make—and the ultimate choice Mia commands.
When the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy emerged as a political compromise under Bill Clinton in 1993, it only ended up worsening the destructive gay ban that had been on the books since World War II. Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Nathaniel Frank exposes the military’s policy toward gays and lesbians as damaging and demonstrates that “don’t ask, don’t tell” must be replaced with an outright reversal of the gay ban.Read an excerpt from Unfriendly Fire, and learn more about the book and author at the Unfriendly Fire website and blog.
Frank is one of the nation’s leading experts on gays in the military, and in his evenhanded and always scrupulously documented chronicle, he reveals how the ban on open gays and lesbians in the U.S. military has greatly increased discharges, hampered recruitment, and—contrary to the rationale offered by proponents of the ban—led to lower morale and cohesion within military ranks.
Frank does not shy away from tackling controversial issues, and he presents indisputable evidence showing that gays already serve openly without causing problems, and that the policy itself is weakening the military it was supposed to protect. In addition to the moral pitfalls of the gay ban, Frank shows the practical damage it has wrought. Most recently, the discharge of valuable Arabic translators (who happen to be gay) under the current policy has left U.S. forces ill-equipped in the fight against terrorism.
Part history, part exposé, and fully revealing, Unfriendly Fire is poised to become the definitive story of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” This lively and compelling narrative is sure to make the blood boil of any American who cares about national security, the right to speak the truth, or just plain common sense and fairness.
Elizabeth Scott on Bones of Faerie:Bones of Faerie was not at all what I was expecting. It is about faeries--a very popular topic these days--but it's also about so much more. Liza lives in our world but it's a changed one, one where a war between faerie and mankind have left everyone struggling to survive. After her newborn sister is killed--on suspicion of having magic in her--and her mother disappears, Liza ends up setting off to try and find her mother and ends up discovering that her mother, and others in her village, had their own secrets, and that she too isn't what she seems. Bones of Faerie is a story about family, love, loss, and the journey to become who you truly are. It is truly unique and an outstanding read.Learn about what Simner has been reading at Writers Read: Janni Lee Simner.
c breakthroughs.The First Word by Christine Kenneally (Penguin, $16).Read about another title on Johnson's list.
Kenneally’s 2007 book is the story of modern linguistics. Its account of Noam Chomsky’s breakthrough work on generative grammar—and the controversy it sparked—is riveting intellectual history, as is the explanation of Chomsky’s strange resistance to Darwinian explanations of our “language instinct.”
A haunting novel of loss, love, and human connection from the author of Astrid & VeronikaRead an excerpt from Sonata for Miriam, and learn more about the book and author at Linda Olsson's website.
Linda Olsson’s first novel, Astrid & Veronika, introduced readers to her gorgeous prose, and her extraordinary understanding of human relationships. With her second novel, she once again charts that terrain in a novel that also explores the significant impact of history on individual lives. In Sonata for Miriam, two events occur that will change composer Adam Anker’s life forever. Embarking on a journey that ranges from New Zealand to Poland, and then Sweden, Anker not only uncovers his parents’ true fate during World War II, but he also finally faces the consequences of an impossible choice he was forced to make twenty years before—a choice that changed the trajectory of his life.
Aliens are big in America. Whether they’ve arrived via rocket, flying saucer, or plain old teleportation, they’ve been invading, infiltrating, or inspiring us for decades, and they’ve fascinated moviegoers and television watchers for more than fifty years. About half of us believe that aliens really exist, and millions are convinced they’ve visited Earth.Read an excerpt from Confessions of an Alien Hunter and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
For twenty-five years, SETI has been looking for the proof, and as the program’s senior astronomer, Seth Shostak explains in this engrossing book, it’s entirely possible that before long conclusive evidence will be found.
His informative, entertaining report offers an insider’s view of what we might realistically expect to discover light-years away among the stars. Neither humanoids nor monsters, says Shostak; in fact, biological intelligence is probably just a precursor to machine beings, enormously advanced artificial sentients whose capabilities and accomplishments may have developed over billions of years and far exceed our own.
As he explores what, if anything, they would tell us and what their existence would portend for humankind and the cosmos, he introduces a colorful cast of characters and provides a vivid, state-of-the-art account of the past, present, and future of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
A long time ago, a friend at a publishing house told me to stop "mucking about" and write about family life. 'It's the only real subject. BIG TIP.'One title on the list:So I've followed her advice and written East Fortune, a novel about three brothers. I did think I was doing something a bit different until I realised there were hundreds of novels about, ahem, brothers and family life. You can't beat it as a subject: submerged emotions, intense rivalries, unrealistic expectations, differing levels of secrecy, betrayals both major and minor, and the genetic identity we can never escape. And if you then factor in the male ego, and tell a story of brotherly love and resentment then surely you can't go too far wrong?
The Sound and the Fury by William FaulknerRead about Number One on Runcie's list.
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story is told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the congenital "idiot" Benjy, the neurotically suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. An intensely passionate novel about loneliness, selfishness, and unreliability, this is, essentially, Virginia Woolf on drugs.
A thirteen-year-old girl and her father live in Forest Park, the enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. There they inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, bathe in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water’s edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a library of sorts. Once a week, they go to the city to buy groceries and otherwise merge with the civilized world. But one small mistake allows a backcountry jogger to discover them, which derails their entire existence, ultimately provoking a deeper flight.Learn more about the author at Peter Rock's website.
Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of a young narrator, Caroline, Peter Rock's My Abandonment is a riveting journey into life at the margins, and a mesmerizing tale of survival and hope.
The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Joshua Gans, an economics professor at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and the author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting.Here Comes Everybody by Clay ShirkySee the Table of Contents and sample chapters from Parentonomics, and visit the Parentonomics website.Clay Shirky is a professor at NYU and writes about the impact of the internet on society and the economy. I picked up this book because of a current interest that I have in what is to become of the newspapers. Clay Shirky's simple answer is that we are in one of those times where there is transformational change and that it may take a decade or more for the shackles of the past to be dropped and some new stability to emerge. In the meantime, that change will be tough on many people. As an example, Shirky points to the the profession of scribe as the printing press diffused. Even when it was inevitable that the whole profession would die, for years there were movements to protect scribes as the supposed learned part of society. The great thing about this book is that it uses many current examples and anecdotes to help us come to terms with what the Internet is doing; something that is mostly for the good. [read on]
Oh, man, whenever I get asked to say something apropos contemporary culture, I despair. Who’d star in the movie version of my novel? What is this thing called movie? Could be the only actor I’ve heard of is Philip Seymour Hoffman, and that only because he’s got pretensions to serious art, and I am just pretentious enough to catch wind of that kind of thing. Alas, I can’t think of a suitable role for him, unless he wants to play the Older Drunk Guy, but then didn’t he cover that in Long Day’s Journey into Night? For the record: O’Neill to Maazel is not a trajectory I recommend. Even so, don’t get me wrong: I am nowhere near above dreaming my novel into a movie, though I hardly care about the movie part. I certainly...[read on]Learn more about Last Last Chance and its author at Fiona Maazel's website.
The Corrections, by Jonathan FranzenRead about another episode of drunkenness on Mullan's list.
Barbecuing family supper, vodka-addled Gary Lambert sets the grill on fire. He trims the hedge and severely lacerates himself. Creeping to the liquor cabinet to tip more vodka down his throat, he suddenly notices that he is being monitored by his teenage son's surveillance camera. No secrets in this family.
Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 and ending with America's entry into the Second World War, the long Depression decade was a period of immense social, economic and political turmoil. In response, writers as various as John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, Pearl S. Buck and others looked to the past to make sense of the present. In this important new study of the 1930s, the distinguished cultural historian Peter Conn traces the extensive and complex engagement with the past that characterized the imaginative writing of the decade. Moving expertly between historical events and literature, Conn includes discussions of historical novels, plays and poems, biographies and autobiographies, as well as factual and imaginary works of history. Mapping the decade’s extraordinary intellectual range with authority and flair, The American 1930s is a widely anticipated contribution to American literary studies.Read an excerpt from The American 1930s: A Literary History, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.
You're twelve years old. A month has passed since your Korean Air flight landed at lovely Newark Airport. Your fifteen-year-old sister is miserable. Your mother isn't exactly happy, either. You're seeing your father for the first time in five years, and although he's nice enough, he might be, well--how can you put this delicately?--a loser.Read an excerpt from Everything Asian, and learn more about the book and author at Sung J. Woo's website.
You can't speak English, but that doesn't stop you from working at East Meets West, your father's gift shop in a strip mall, where everything is new.
Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim.
He named his five most essential books for Newsweek. And addressed two related issues:A Classic You Revisited With Disappointment:Read more about Kurt Andersen's five most essential books.
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway. His manliness was easier to admire before I'd actually become a man.
A Book To Which You Always Return:
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I return to it once a decade. Each time it reads like a different novel.
of Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics, Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture, and coeditor of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future.
The squat, noisy duck occupies a prominent role in the human cultural imagination, as evidenced by everything from the rubber duck of childhood baths to insurance commercials. With Duck, Victoria de Rijke explores the universality of this quacking bird through the course of human culture and history.
From the Eider duck to the Brazilian teal to the familiar mallard, duck species are richly diverse, and de Rijke offers a comprehensive overview of their evolutionary history. She explores the numerous roles that the duck plays in literature, art, and religion—including the Hebrew belief that ducks represent immortality, and the Finnish myth that the universe was hatched from a duck’s egg. The author also highlights the significant role humor has always played in human imaginings of duck life, such as the Topographia Hibernia, a twelfth-century tome contending that ducks originated as growths on tree trunks washed up on a beach. But the book does not neglect the bird’s role in everyday life as well, from food dishes to jokes to beloved animated characters such as Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. Duck is an entertaining account of a bird whose distinctive silhouette is known the world over.
Prussia has been overrun by Napoleon’s forces, and the Emperor’s troops have discovered a new source of funds there: enough amber to finance France’s wars. But their plans stall when the girls who collect the stones begin to disappear, only to be found gruesomely disfigured by an unknown killer. The French call upon Prussian investigator Hanno Stiffeniis, who must seek out the culprit knowing hat his own success may doom his country’s future. Dark, intelligent, and vividly written, A Visible Darkness continues a masterful series of historical mysteries that portray a past torn between nationalism and humanism, superstition and science.Read Chapter 1 of A Visible Darkness, and learn more about the authors and their work at Michael Gregorio's website and blog.
Waterland by Graham SwiftRead about another flood on Mullan's list.
The fenland town of Gildsey is used to floods (the main road is Water Street) but just survives the great 19th-century inundation that carries away gravestones, rips lock gates apart and sends empty lighters "drifting at random over former fields of wheat and potatoes".
“Hands On Emergency. This is Jessie. Is there an emergency in the vehicle?”Read the first chapter from Liars Anonymous, and learn more about the author and her work at Louise Ure's website.
Roadside Assistance Operator, Jessie Dancing, knows what it’s like to take a life, and she’s trying to put that memory behind her. But when the call comes in from real estate tycoon Darren Markson, she thinks she hears him being killed while she’s on the phone with him. This can’t be, but she knows the world of violence and death is never far away. Jessie travels from Phoenix to her hometown of Tucson to let Markson’s wife hear that last communication from her husband. But according to Emily he’s very much alive...
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and writer who lives in Goa, India.Read about Sudhir Kakar's five favorite books about India.Atomised by Michel Houellebecq.
Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Award, the most prestigious prize in international literary fiction, this is a fascinating novel of ideas that showcases the author’s abhorrence of the lifestyles and the underlying values of the modern world. It is spiced with some of the filthiest sex scenes in contemporary literature that, however, evoke disgust more than prurience.[read on]
A gripping epic about the great moral struggles of the Civil War.Read the first chapter of All Other Nights and learn more about the author and her work at Dara Horn's website.
How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army, it is a question his commanders have answered for him: on Passover in 1862 he is ordered to murder his own uncle, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln.
After that night, will Jacob ever speak for himself? The answer comes when his commanders send him on another mission—this time not to murder a spy but to marry one.
A page-turner rich with romance and the history of America (North and South), this is a book only Dara Horn could have written. Full of in-sight and surprise, layered with meaning, it is a brilliant parable of the moral divide that still haunts us: between those who value family first and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.
Roy Blount Jr.'s books include Alphabet Juice (2008) and Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South (2007).NorwoodRead about Number One on Blount's list.
by Charles Portis
Simon & Schuster, 1966
His many writerly enthusiasts periodically proclaim that Charles Portis, of Arkansas, is a great, grossly underappreciated comic novelist, and we are right.Some prefer "The Dog of the South" or "Masters of Atlantis," and I would be the last to deny the merits of those . . . Oh Lord, I've been sitting here for half an hour trying to think of some way to evoke how purely, unforcedly funny Portis is without using pushy words like "hilarious" that he would die before using. "Norwood" is my first love among his novels, but I don't want to thrust it upon you; it can take care of itself. In fact, it probably isn't any better than those other two, or than "True Grit," which was Portis's one big popular success. "Norwood" is the story of a Korean War vet traveling to New York to collect a debt. Along the way he meets the world's smallest perfect fat man and rescues a performing chicken named Joann.
About the novel:You are U.S. Army Military Intelligence trainee David Dengler. Following Army M.I. tradition, you are sent on a training exercise to a city you’ve never visited before and ordered to surveil a public person (‘public persons’ having little recourse if their privacy is invaded). You can’t believe your good fortune. You draw the assignment to surveil Marilyn Monroe. It is early August, 1962, and you have just been made a witness to the murder of Hollywood’s biggest star.Read an excerpt from Red Mist, and learn more about the book and author at Richard Taylor's website.
Red Mist is a fast-paced thriller that recreates the world of 1960s America, a decade obsessed with sex, violence, and espionage. Follow David Dengler as he flees from unknown assassins, and struggles to stay alive as dark forces compress him from all sides, driving him to a rendezvous with death... in Dealey Plaza.
The entry starts:The only actor who comes to mind to play Melvin Podgorski is Jon Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite fame. This is maybe taking the requirements to the extreme. Melvin could not be played by someone devastatingly handsome or possessing any measure of natural bravado and swagger. Melvin is an anxious, uncertain, jittery, unconfident, yearning but timid type. He is described on the book jacket and in virtually all the book’s press as “naïve.” Therefore it’s hard to imagine anyone with a known face and long resume playing him.Read an excerpt from Javascotia, and learn more about the novel and its author at Benjamin Obler's website and blog.
He’s also in his early twenties, which rules out most actors who have been around long enough that they might spring to mind. In fact, someone entirely unknown would fit the bill very well. A callow and overeager novice might depict Mel perfectly.
For Nicole,...[read on]
For The Week magazine, he named his six favorite baseball books. One title on the list:Game Time by Roger Angell (Harvest, $15).Read about another book on Werner's list.
Any list of this kind should include the writings of Angell, the finest sportswriter of our era. This compilation happens to include his 2001 prediction that Fenway Park would be torn down as soon as the “new management” found a place to put “a nice, modern $500 million park with luxury suites and limo parking.” Angell is a great writer, but I didn’t claim he is a prophet!
Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Using first a wide lens, he suggests a new way to capture the relationship between China and Japan by characterizing the nature of their contact. From the first century ce, the primary reasons for contact moved from political and ceremonial to cultural, and on to commercial ties. This period ends at the dawn of the modern age, when contacts involved treaties, consulates, and international law.Read an excerpt from Articulating the Sinosphere.
Switching to a microhistorical view, Fogel examines several important behind-the-scenes players in the launching of the countries’ modern diplomatic relations. He focuses on the voyage of the Senzaimaru from Nagasaki to Shanghai in 1862—the first official meeting of Chinese and Japanese in the modern era—and the Dutchman who played an important intermediary role. Finally, he examines the first expatriate Japanese community in the modern era, in Shanghai from the 1860s to the mid-1890s, when the first Sino-Japanese War erupted.
Introducing the concept of “Sinosphere” to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Michael Jubien, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida and the author of the newly released Possibility (Oxford University Press).I am about 1000 or so pages into the recent, Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. I read the Garnett translation when I was in high school as part of an effort to go through all of the Modern Library’s Russian classics, but in retrospect I think I was in too much of a hurry and was too young to appreciate the deep and rich beauty of this titan of a book. The early reviews of the P-V translation were so favorable that I decided it was time to read it again, but to read itLearn more about Michael Jubien's scholarship at his faculty webpage.slowly and carefully this time. This approach has resulted in perhaps the most rewarding reading I’ve ever done.
This is clearly not the place for a book review or a summary of any kind. So I’ll just point to a few aspects of the book that have struck me the most, endearing me to the book. (1) Tolstoy’s detailed portrayal of the elite of Russian society is deeply sympathetic while often rather critical and even cynical. He really seems to be a ‘naturalist’ about people, their charms and their flaws, and their rituals and institutions. (2) His descriptions both of scenes in nature and episodes of human interaction, especially among children and young adults, are often remarkably beautiful and moving....[read on]
Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math—and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin’s brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes. While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something—some other—lurking in the background. And it’s getting more and more intelligent with each passing day…Read the opening chapters of WWW: Wake, and learn more about the book and author at Robert J. Sawyer's website and blog.
One title on the list:The Clavicule of SolomonRead about another book on Davies' list.
This is the granddaddy of grimoires. Mystical books purporting to be written by King Solomon were already circulating in the eastern Mediterranean during the first few centuries AD. By the 15th century hundreds of copies were in the hands of Western scientists and clergymen. While some denounced these Solomonic texts as heretical, many clergymen secretly pored over them. Some had lofty ambitions to obtain wisdom from the "wisest of the wise", while others sought to enrich themselves by discovering treasures and vanquishing the spirits that guarded them.
With clarity and concision, Juan Cole disentangles the key foreign policy issues that America is grappling with today--from our dependence on Middle East petroleum to the promotion of Islamophobia by the American right--and delivers his informed advice on the best way forward. Cole’s unique ability to take the true Muslim perspective into account when looking at East-West relations make his insights well-rounded and prescient as he suggests a course of action on fundamental issues like religion, oil, war and peace. With substantive recommendations for the next administration on how to move forward in key countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, Engaging the Muslim World reveals how we can repair the damage of the disastrous foreign policy of the last eight years and forge ahead on a path of peace and prosperity.Read an excerpt from Engaging the Muslim World and visit Juan Cole's website.
Cole argues:
* Al-Qaeda is not a mass movement like fascism or communism but rather a small political cult like the American far right circles that produced Timothy McVeigh.
* The Muslim world is not a new Soviet Bloc but rather is full of close allies or potential allies.
* There can be no such thing as American energy independence, we will need Islamic oil to survive as a superpower into the next century.
* Iran is not an implacable enemy of the U.S.--it can and should be fruitfully engaged, which is a necessary step for American energy security since Tehran can play the spoiler in the strategic Persian Gulf.
* America's best hope in Iraq is careful, deliberate military disengagement, rather than either through immediate withdrawal or a century-long military presence--in other words, both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates are wrong.
Ever wonder what would happen if George Costanza joined the NYPD?Learn more about Bad Cop and its author at Paul Bacon's website.
Wonder no more. Freelance journalist Bacon, one of the millions of New Yorkers shaken to the core by the attacks of 9/11, decided to join the police force. He wanted to do his part to help both the city and society as a whole—despite the fact that he smoked weed, hated guns and had zero background in law enforcement. Off he went to the police academy, where he was tormented, teased and molded into some semblance of a police officer. Then Bacon took to the streets, where...[read on]
--Kirkus Reviews
Enduring Love by Ian McEwanRead about another example of unrequited love on Mullan's list.
McEwan describes what it is like being the object of unwanted devotion. Joe tries to save a man in a ballooning accident, only to find that one of his fellow would-be rescuers, Jed, has become fixated on him. Other ages called it unrequited passion; we call it stalking.
A deeply moving story of the complicated bond between brother and sisterRead an excerpt from The Local News, and learn more about the book and author at Miriam Gershow's website.
“Going missing was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done.” Even a decade later, the memories of the year Lydia Pasternak turned sixteen continue to haunt her. As a teenager, Lydia lived in her older brother’s shadow. While Danny’s athletic skills and good looks established his place with the popular set at school, Lydia’s smarts relegated her to the sidelines, where she rolled her eyes at her brother and his meathead friends and suffered his casual cruelty with resigned bewilderment. Though a part of her secretly wished for a return of the easy friendship she and Danny shared as children, another part of her wished Danny would just vanish. And then, one night, he did.
In the year following Danny Pasternak’s disappearance, his parents go off the rails, his town buzzes with self-indulgent mourning, and his little sister Lydia finds herself thrust into unwanted celebrity, forced to negotiate her ambivalent—often grudging—grief for a brother she did not particularly like. Suddenly embraced by Danny’s old crowd, forgotten by her parents, and drawn into the missing person investigation by her family’s intriguing private eye, Lydia both blossoms and struggles to find herself during Danny’s absence. But when a trail of clues leads to a shocking outcome in her brother’s case, the teenaged Lydia and the adult she will become are irrevocably changed, even now as she reluctantly prepares to return to her hometown.
Relentlessly gripping, often funny, and profoundly moving, The Local News is a powerful exploration of the fraught relationship between a brother and sister and how our siblings define who we are.
About the book, from the publisher:The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization.Read an excerpt from Empires of the Silk Road, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.
Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.
From Russia with Love by Ian FlemingRead about another novel on the list.
Fleming brought a new precision to the business of intimate violence. As Bond tackles a Smersh assassin on a train speeding through the Simplon Tunnel, we see close up the dying hitman's "terrible face, its eyes shining violet, the violet teeth bared".
The time has come to stand against the night.Read a long excerpt from The Warded Man, and learn more about the author and his work at Peter V. Brett's website.
As darkness falls each night, the corelings rise–demons who well up from the ground like hellish steam, taking on fearsome form and substance. Sand demons. Wood demons. Wind demons. Flame demons. And gigantic rock demons, the deadliest of all. They possess supernatural strength and powers and burn with a consuming hatred of humanity. For hundreds of years the demons have terrorized the night, slowly culling the human herd that shelters behind magical wards–symbols of power whose origins are lost in myth and mystery, and whose protection is terrifyingly fragile.
It was not always this way. Once, men and women battled the corelings on equal terms. Once, under the leadership of the legendary Deliverer, and armed with powerful wards that were not merely shields but weapons, they took the battle to the demons ... and stopped their advance.
But those days are gone. The fighting wards are lost. Night by night the demons grow stronger, while human numbers dwindle under their relentless assault.
Now, with hope for the future fading, three young survivors of vicious demon attacks will dare the impossible, stepping beyond the crumbling safety of the wards to risk everything in a desperate quest to regain the secrets of the past.
Arlen will pay any price, embrace any sacrifice, for freedom. His grim journey will take him beyond the bounds of human power.
Crippled by the demons that killed his parents, Rojer seeks solace in music–only to discover that music can be a weapon as well as a refuge.
Beautiful Leesha, who has suffered at the hands of men as well as demons, becomes an expert healer. But what cures can also harm....
Together, they will stand against the night.
An associate professor of English at Mary Baldwin College, Sarah Kennedy lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with her husband.But of course I don’t ever get very far from poetry. Right now I have some books by young writers on my table—Katie Cappello’s Perpetual Care, which I have just begun; K. A. Hays’s Dear Apocalypse, and Farrah Field’s Rising. I am putting off Field’s book until last, because I was so taken by the title of the first poem, “Self-Portrait in Toad Suck, Arkansas,” that I’m afraid if I begin the book I will miss class to finish it. (The cover of this book is very appealing too.) I find myself these days drawn to books that have historical and political heft, though that weight can sink a book that lacks complicated tropes and tones. Still, I want poems to do more and more work these days; I want more meaning, more layers to investigate. This is one reason that Hays’s book has been lingering on my desk and in my mind. Her use of biblical allusion, religious registers of language, and the natural world resonate in ways that
keep me coming back to individual poems (particularly “The Way of all the Earth,” at least today). Tomorrow, however, is Saturday, and I believe I’m going to let myself dive into Rising.[read on]
The entry begins:I must confess that I have been procrastinating like crazy on Marshal’s generous invitation to submit a blog for My Book the Movie. Because here’s the thing: I’m one of those weird writers who NEVER had any actors or actresses in mind to play her characters when she wrote her novel. Oh, of course Hollywood would be CALLING (hey, it’s my fantasy, don’t step on the fur-lined handcuffs and just let me have my naïve, grandiose dreams) … but I figured I’d let them handle the logistics, like who would be playing whom, and who would be painting my toenails and feeding me M&Ms. Seriously, just set me up in my lil’ director’s chair, plop a beret on my head, and I’ll be as happy as a pig in stink.Read an excerpt from Driving Sideways, and learn more about the book and author at Jess Riley's website, blog, and MySpace page.
I’m from the Midwest, so it’s entirely legal and appropriate for me to say that.
Anyway, I only have one actress in mind for one of my characters, and that’s...[read on]
About the book, from the publisher:When John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he also won the right to put his own spin on the victory—whether as an underdog’s heroic triumph or a liberal crusader’s overcoming special interests. Now W. J. Rorabaugh cuts through the mythology of this famous election to explain the nuts-and-bolts operations of the campaign and offer a corrective to Theodore White’s flawed classic, The Making of the President.Read more about The Real Making of the President at the publisher's website.
Despite a less than liberal record, JFK assumed the image of liberal hero—thanks to White and other journalists who were shamelessly manipulated by the Kennedy campaign. Rorabaugh instead paints JFK as the ideological twin of Nixon and his equal as a bare-knuckled politician, showing that Kennedy’s hard-won, razor-thin victory was attributable less to his legendary charisma than to an enormous amount of money, an effective campaign organization, and television image-making.
The 1960 election, Rorabaugh argues, reflects the transition from the dominance of old-style boss and convention politics to the growing significance of primaries, race, and especially TV—without which Kennedy would have been neither nominated nor elected. He recounts how JFK cultivated delegates to the 1960 Democratic convention; quietly wooed the still-important party bosses; and used a large personal organization, polls, and TV advertising to win primaries. JFK’s master stroke, however, was choosing as a running mate Lyndon Johnson, whose campaigning in the South carried enough southern states to win the election.
On the other side, Rorabaugh draws on Nixon’s often-ignored files to take a close look at his dysfunctional campaign, which reflected the oddities of a dark and brooding candidate trapped into defending the Eisenhower administration. Yet the widely detested Nixon won almost as many votes as the charismatic Kennedy. This leads Rorabaugh to reexamine the darker side of the election: the Republicans’ charges of vote fraud in Illinois and Texas, the use of money to prod or intimidate, manipulation of the media, and the bulldozing of opponents.
The Real Making of the President gives us a sobering look at all of this, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of one of the nation’s most memorable elections.
Richard Price's novels include the national best-sellers Freedomland, Clockers, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and 2008's brilliant Lush Life.The Call of the Wild also appears among the top 10 snow books and top 10 tales of metamorphosis.A book you hope parents read to their kids:
"Call of the Wild" by Jack London. Because it's starkly beautiful.
A classic book you've never read:
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. Because it was forced on me in school.
An ancient weapon has completely destroyed the city of Windwir. From many miles away, Rudolfo, Lord of the Nine Forest Houses, sees the horrifying column of smoke rising. He knows that war is coming to the Named Lands.Read an excerpt from Lamentation, listen to an audio excerpt, and watch a video interview with Ken Scholes.
Nearer to the Devastation, a young apprentice is the only survivor of the city – he sat waiting for his father outside the walls, and was transformed as he watched everyone he knew die in an instant.
Soon all the Kingdoms of the Named Lands will be at each others' throats, as alliances are challenged and hidden plots are uncovered.
This remarkable first novel from an award-winning short fiction writer will take readers away to a new world – an Earth so far in the distant future that our time is not even a memory; a world where magick is commonplace and great areas of the planet are impassable wastes. But human nature hasn’t changed through the ages: War and faith and love still move princes and nations.
Sudhir Kakar, whose books include The Indians: Portrait of a People and the forthcoming Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World, named a five best books about India list for the Wall Street Journal.Autobiography of an Unknown IndianRead about Number One on Kakar's list.
by Nirad Chaudhuri
Macmillan, 1951
In his "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian," Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) gives us a tragi-comic portrait of an Indian middle class eternally caught between the traditional and the modern. His memoir begins early in the 20th century, when he wasgrowing up in rural Bengal; it then describes his youth in Calcutta and his life as a struggling writer in Delhi just after Indian independence in 1947. When the book was published, many Indians were outraged by Chaudhuri's paeans to the country's recently departed British rulers and by his detestation of all things Indian. With the passage of time, though, Chaudhuri's intemperate outbursts and his attacks on his countrymen's failings came to be regarded as part of his lovable eccentricity. The book remains one of the best chronicles of the Indian middle class's enduring love affair with the West, even if England has since been replaced by the U.S. as the object of desire.
About the book, from the publisher:Scientists have long theorized that abstract, symbolic thinking evolved to help humans negotiate such classically male activities as hunting, tool making, and warfare, and eventually developed into spoken language. In Finding Our Tongues, Dean Falk overturns this established idea, offering a daring new theory that springs from a simple observation: parents all over the world, in all cultures, talk to infants by using baby talk or “Motherese.” Falk shows how Motherese developed as a way of reassuring babies when mothers had to put them down in order to do work. The melodic vocalizations of early Motherese not only provided the basis of language but also contributed to the growth of music and art. Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with classic anthropology, Falk offers a potent challenge to conventional wisdom about the emergence of human language.Read more about Finding Our Tongues at the publisher's website.
His entry begins: I am a bizarre reader. As a rule, I am trying to read something very different from what I am writing/researching at that time. Over the last three months I have been working on a book on Vladimir Lenin, which is my third monograph. Of course, I had to read through 55 vols. of Lenin's complete works (in Russian). Yet I cannot say "I read Lenin." Rather I should modestly say, I did my research on him. What I read was different.[read on]Read an excerpt from The Anti-Imperial Choice and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.
About the book, from the publisher:On a cold January morning, a nightmare awaits in a small Sussex village. A deranged young man goes on the rampage, shooting everyone in his path before taking his own life. It is a senseless, tragic event, but sadly not an unfamiliar one.Read an excerpt from Skin and Bones and watch the video trailer.
At least, that's what everyone thinks.
Only Julia Trent – believed to be the sole survivor – knows that there was a second man involved. But after being shot and badly injured, her account of the massacre is ignored.
But she cannot let it rest there. Together with Craig Walker, the journalist son of one of the victims, Julia sets out to find the truth. As they peel back the layers of a dark and dangerous conspiracy, they discover the slaughter didn't begin on that bitter day in January. And worst of all, it won't end there…
One title on the list:The End of the Affair by Graham GreeneRead about another title on Kennedy's list.
A love story about the impossibility of love, and the way love often becomes a high-stakes game of possessiveness. It is also a remarkable examination of one man's cathartic journey into the realm of emotional distress after a lifetime of dodging all feeling.
About the book, from the publisher:A few years ago, MySpace.com was just an idea kicking around a Southern California spam mill. Scroll down to the present day and MySpace is one of the most visited Internet destinations in America, displaying more than 40 billion webpage views per month and generating nearly $1 billion annually for Rupert Murdoch’s online empire. Even by the standards of the Internet age, the MySpace saga is an astounding growth story, which climaxed with the site’s acquisition by Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 for a sum approaching one billion dollars. But more than that, it may be the defining drama of the digital era.Read an excerpt from Stealing MySpace, and visit Julia Angwin's website and blog.
In Stealing MySpace, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Angwin chronicles the rise of this Internet powerhouse. With an unerring eye, Angwin details how MySpace took the Internet by storm by grabbing the best ideas from around the Web, encouraging pinup stars such as Tila Tequila to make their home on its pages and giving everyone freedom to experiment with online identities–including using somebody else’s identity.
Stealing MySpace introduces us to the site’s founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who dabbled in computer hacking, online pornography, spam, and spyware before starting MySpace. Although their street savvy, doggedness, and clubbing skills far eclipsed their tech prowess, they stumbled their way to success and soon found themselves at ground zero of a high-stakes war that pitted Rupert Murdoch against his frequent nemesis, the combative Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. Angwin sheds light on the dizzying backroom deals that allowed Murdoch to snatch MySpace from Viacom’s grasp even as the MySpace founders remained in the dark about their own fate. Then she takes us inside the Murdoch empire as DeWolfe and Anderson lobby furiously to regain control of their creation.
Venturing beyond the business aspects of the story, Angwin also explores the Internet culture, a voyeuristic world in which MySpace must stay one step ahead of amateur pornographers, sexual predators, and “spoofers” who set up fake profiles (Rupert Murdoch himself tolerates dozens of phony “Ruperts” on the site) and cope with the general excesses and sometimes illegal acts of a community of account holders equal in number to the population of Japan.
In Stealing MySpace, Julia Angwin dishes on the epic real-world battle for control of a virtual empire. In a savvy, smart, fast-paced narrative reminiscent of Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate and Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing, Stealing MySpace tells is the whole gripping story behind a breakout cultural phenomenon.
One book on the list:Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus by Ingrid Schaffner (Princeton, $60).Read about another book on LaBute's list.
This fascinating visual document of a little-remembered controversy from the 1939 World’s Fair walks readers through both the glory and the travesty of an artsy fun house created by Dalí. It’s exactly what you would expect from the surrealist and yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
About the book, from the publisher:One of the most enduring and influential of all human institutions, the papacy has also been amongst the most controversial. No one who seeks to make sense of modern issues within Christendom—or, indeed, world history—can neglect the vital shaping role of the popes. In Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, eminent religion scholar Roger Collins offers a masterful account of the entire arc of papal history—from the separation of the Greek and Latin churches to the contemporary controversies that threaten the unity of the one billion-strong worldwide Catholic community. A definitive and accessible guide to what is arguably the world’s most vaunted office, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of faith in the shaping of our world.Learn more about Keepers of the Keys of Heaven at the publisher's website.
One paragraph from her entry:"Deceptively touching…the twist of a family of thieves gives the story originality."
—School Library Journal
"Few other writers tell stories as heartbreaking, hilarious, complicated and true as Elizabeth Scott, and Love You Hate You Miss You is probably her very best yet."
—Claudia Gray, author of Evernight
"Reminiscent of John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005) ... a satisfying story of an engaging heroine successfully naming and confronting her demons."
—Booklist
Janni Lee Simner's young adult novel Bones of Faerie was not at all what I was expecting. It is about faeries--a very popular topic these days--but it's also about so much more. Liza lives in our world but it's a changed one, one where a war between faerie and mankind have left everyone struggling to survive. After her newborn sister is killed--on suspicion of having magic in her--and her mother disappears, Liza ends up setting off to try and find her mother and ends up discovering that her mother, and others in her village, had their own secrets, and that she too isn't what she seems. Bones of Faerie is a story about family, love, loss, and the journey to become who you truly are. It is truly unique and an outstanding read.[read on]Visit Elizabeth Scott's website and blog.
About the book, from the publisher:Like many Jews and Christians, David Plotz long assumed he knew what was in the Bible. He read parts of it as a child in Hebrew school, then at-tended a Christian high school where he studied the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck with him—Adam and Eve, Cain versus Abel, Jacob versus Esau, Jonah versus whale, forty days and nights, ten plagues and commandments, twelve tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, he absorbed from all around him other bits of the Bible—from stories he heard in churches and synagogues, in movies and on television, from his parents and teachers. But it wasn't until he picked up a Bible at a cousin's bat mitzvah—and became engrossed and horrified by a lesser-known story in Genesis—that he couldn't put it down.Browse inside Good Book and read Plotz's essay "What I learned from reading the entire Bible."
At a time when wars are fought over scriptural interpretation, when the influence of religion on American politics has never been greater, when many Americans still believe in the Bible's literal truth, it has never been more important to get to know the Bible. Good Book is what happens when a regular guy—an average Job—actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based. Along the way, he grapples with the most profound theological questions: How many commandments do we actually need? Does God prefer obedience or good deeds? And the most unexpected ones: Why are so many women in the Bible prostitutes? Why does God love bald men so much? Is Samson really that stupid?
Good Book is an irreverent, enthralling journey through the world's most important work of literature.
One novel on the list:Treasure Island, by RL StevensonRead about another pirate on Mullan's list.
The sound of Blind Pew tapping his way along with his stick outside the Admiral Benbow inn is one of the most spine-tingling in all children's fiction, but Stevenson knew that the best pirate combines terror with charm. Thus the horror at human perfidy when Jim Hawkins, hidden in the apple barrel, overhears Long John Silver's evil plans. A treasure map, Captain Flint, "pieces of eight": every element of Stevenson's yarn has entered the collective unconscious.
About the book, from the publisher:The Sinister Side is the first book to detail the richness and subtlety of left-right symbolism since the Renaissance, and to show how it was a catalyst for some of the greatest works of visual art from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Picasso. Traditionally, the left side was regarded as evil, weak, and worldly, but with the Renaissance, artists began to represent the left side as the side that represented authentic human feelings and especially love. Writers including Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo, and Winckelmann hailed the supreme moral and aesthetic beauty of the left side. Images of lovers foreground the left side of the body, emphasizing its refinement and sensitivity. In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of interest in the occult and in spiritualism, the left side becomes associated with the taboo and with the unconscious. James Hall's insightful discussion of left and right symbolism helps us to see how the self and the mind were perceived during these periods, and gives us a new key to understanding art in its social and intellectual context.Learn more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.
Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Crazy Heart by Thomas Cobb.As I write this, they actually have made a film of my novel Crazy Heart after 21 years of various options. I originally pictured an actual country singer in the role of (country singer) Bad Blake. My first thoughts were Willie Nelson, or, even better, Waylon Jennings. Over the years a number of actors pitched themselves for the role--Lane Smith, Margot Kidder, Ronnie Cox and Lisa Blount. None of them came very close to my idea of the character.Learn more about the author and his work at Thomas Cobb's website.
When the film was actually cast, with...[read on]
The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of the newly released Crazy Love, a memoir about surviving domestic violence.I am rereading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. I saw the movie firstVisit Leslie Morgan Steiner's website.almost by accident -- my husband was out of town and I stumbled into the theater looking for a good chic flick. I liked the film so much that I went straight to Barnes and Noble next door and bought all fourbooks. I have enjoyed them immensely. I think the fourth, Breaking Dawn, is the best one -- quite an accomplishment for any author. I find the second time around the books are just as compelling, thrilling, and entertaining. I find it difficult to believe that Bella isn't walking around the Pacific Northwest as I write this -- she is very real to me.[read on]
One title on the list:One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.Read about another book on Mosley's list.
This is one of the most brilliant and funny novels ever written. I come back to this book once every five years or so. Each time I’m astonished at its depth, beauty, and insight. This is the story of a family, a town, a nation, a people, a continent, and the spiritual history of the human race. García Marquez has the knack of taking the ordinary and making it magical. This is true magic—the enchantment of love, memory, obsession, and the flawed attempts of human beings to understand themselves.
About the book, from the publisher:Islamic conceptions of heaven and hell began in the seventh century as an early doctrinal innovation, but by the twelfth century, these notions had evolved into a highly formalized ideal of perfection. In tracking this transformation, Nerina Rustomji reveals the distinct material culture and aesthetic vocabulary Muslims developed to understand heaven and hell and identifies the communities and strategies of defense that took shape around the promise of a future world.Learn more about The Garden and the Fire at the Columbia University Press website.
Ideas of the afterworld profoundly influenced daily behaviors in Islamic society and gave rise to a code of ethics that encouraged abstinence from sumptuous objects, such as silver vessels and silk, so they could be appreciated later in heaven. Rustomji conducts a meticulous study of texts and images and carefully connects the landscape and social dynamics of the afterworld with earthly models and expectations. Male servants and female companions become otherworldly objects in the afterlife, and stories of rewards and punishment helped preachers promote religious reform. By employing material culture as a method of historical inquiry, Rustomji points to the reflections, discussions, and constructions that actively influenced Muslims' picture of the afterworld, culminating in a distinct religious aesthetic.
