Saturday, July 30, 2011

Jonathan Coe's 6 favorite books

Jonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Prix Médicis Étranger, and, for The Rotters’ Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

His latest novel is The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

A panoramic trip through pre- and postwar middle-European history, as observed by the best kind of witness: a bystander — in this case, a naïf who waits tables in Prague. A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature.
Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue