A second edition of Paul Ekman's Emotions Revealed comes out this spring. I've not read the book (and probably won't), but I have read Malcolm Gladwell's essay about Ekman's work and it is fascinating.
Richard Zimler put his novel Guardian of the Dawn to the Page 99 Test.In an age of faith and fireAmong the praise for Guardian of the Dawn:
In a land of many gods
A journey of survival is about to begin.…
In his acclaimed novels Hunting Midnight and The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Richard Zimler has spun luminous historical fiction from the experience of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. Spanning decades and continents, his new novel is set in the lush world of colonial India during the age of the Inquisition. Here is the astonishing story of Tiago Zarco, a young man whose family fled forced conversions in Portugal and now lives in a twilight between local Hindus and the ruling Portuguese Catholics. As Tiago comes of age in Goa, the capital of the spice trade, he struggles to keep the far-reaching powers of the Inquisition from destroying his family and pulling him apart from the Hindu girl he loves. When an act of betrayal puts his beloved father in prison, Tiago is forced to hunt down the traitor and make an unimaginable choice…and for him, a harrowing journey begins–one that will show him the depths of human depravity, and the dark, poisonous salvation of revenge….
At once a grand historical adventure and a riveting tale of love and mystery, Guardian of the Dawn brilliantly illuminates a world that has rarely been described–in a novel that blazes with passion, fury, and hope.
"Deeply absorbing.... [a] rich, fast-moving story."Read an excerpt from the novel, and visit Richard Zimler's website.
–Kirkus Reviews
“Richard Zimler is a superbly talented historical novelist, capable of combining fascinating broad-canvas glimpses of history with the most intimate portraits of the human heart in turmoil.”
–Booklist
“Richard Zimler is a present-day scholar and writer of remarkable erudition and compelling imagination, an American Umberto Eco.”
–Spectator
"Picking up where he left off in The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Zimler tracks the travails of a young Jewish manuscript illustrator who flees with his family from Portugal to India.... an exotic, colorful novel."
- Publishers Weekly
I finished Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (John Banville's crime-writing pen-name), a couple of weeks ago, yet I keep putting off writing a review.Christine Falls is crossover fiction of a very high order. Its mystery plot, while by no means lacking conviction, is frequently upstaged by the aptness and beauty of its insinuating visions.By the way, I was fairly certain that I'd figured out the main who-done-it question early on -- and, while I'm not usually very good at that, I was correct -- but the mystery really isn't the main point in this novel.
--Janet Maslin
It would be absurd to suggest that Banville writing as Black is better than Banville writing as Banville, but in a different and yet fascinatingly similar way he is every bit as good, and deserves to win a new, broader readership with this fine book.
--Michael Dibdin
I was entranced and enmeshed and otherwise embroiled in Black’s tale, classic Dublin noir--if there was such a thing--set in the 1950s and following the familial misdeeds of a Dublin pathologist we only ever know as “Quirke.”
--Linda L. Richards
It’s not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It’s the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse -- and concealing the cause of death.--Marshal Zeringue
It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious -- and very well-guarded -- secrets of Dublin’s high Catholic society, among them members of his own family.
Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize winner John Banville’s fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero, Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black’s debut marks him as a true master of the form.
A recent survey in America asked readers what prompted them to buy a book. They could choose more than one answer. The results were as follows: friend's recommendation (49 per cent), familiarity with author (45 per cent), description on jacket (32 per cent), reviews (22 per cent), advertisement (21 per cent), place on bestsellers list (17 per cent), reading group pick (16 per cent) and cover design (12 per cent).
The fact that jacket copy-writers appear to have more influence than reviewers is - at least in this neck of the woods - rather galling.
I'd like think that the interviewers checked the "friend's recommendation" box for the hundreds of replies of "The Page 69 Test, of course!" But that may not be the case.
--Marshal Zeringue
Today's feature at the Page 69 test: Charlie Huston's No Dominion.Joe Pitt’s life sucks. He hasn’t had a case or a job in God knows how long and his stashes are running on empty. What stashes? The only ones that count to a guy like Joe: blood and money. The money he uses to buy blood; the blood he drinks. Hey, buddy, it’s that or your neck – you want to choose? The only way to lay his hands on both is to take a gig with the local Vampyre Clan. See, something new is on the streets, a new high, a high so strong it can send a Vampyre spazzing through Joe’s local watering hole. Till Joe sends him through a plate-glass window, that is.Among the praise for No Dominion:
So it’s time for Joe to gut up and swallow that pride and follow the leads wherever they go. It won’t be long before he’s slapping stoolies, getting sapped, and being taken for a ride above 110th Street. Someone’s pulling Joe’s strings, and now he’s riding the A train, looking to find who it is. He’s gonna cut them when he finds them – the strings and the hands that hold them.
“Among the new voices of the twenty-first-century crime fiction, Charlie Huston ... is where it’s at.”Visit Charlie Huston's website and read an excerpt from No Dominion. Begin reading the Joe Pitt series with Already Dead.
–Washington Post Book World
"Huston's stylish sophomore outing for hard-boiled vampire detective Joe Pitt maintains the high quality of its predecessor, Already Dead (2005). When a fellow bloodsucker who seems revved up on drugs picks a bar fight with Pitt, the detective discovers that a new drug has hit the street, one strong enough to cut through the vampire virus and make its users do unpredictable things, things that could bring unwelcome exposure to New York's vampire community. Word has it that the drug, "anathema," comes from suppliers in Harlem. The leader of the Society Clan of vampires hires Pitt to investigate uptown, but the all-black vampire clan called the Hood, run by one DJ Grave Digga, has other plans in mind for the rogue detective. Meanwhile, Pitt's HIV-positive girlfriend Evie, who's struggling with a new round of medication, is beginning to lose patience with Pitt's secrecy and disappearances. Indeed, the doomed love story at the heart of Huston's action-filled epic is what truly makes this a noir novel, and the undead microcosm of society he creates is both surprisingly relevant and entertaining."
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Charlie Huston's No Dominion is a perfect mix of P.I. and vampire novels, with this book delving further into the politics of modern day NY vampires to stunning effect."
-Daniel Hatadi
Last week at the Guardian book blog, Diane Shipley wrote in defense of chick lit.Shipley names names; read about the "picks of the chicks" she recommends.didn't entirely buy my argument - but asked me to convince them: where were all these great books I was talking about?
"Persephone 251" said: "...I agree with you about Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday ... but Keyes is the only chick lit writer I can stand to read. I'm absolutely open to reading good chick lit but where is it to be found?"
It's a fair point: given the sheer volume of these novels, some of them (by the law of probability) are bound to be stinkers. So how do you know where to start?
God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane SembèneHere is the Wikipedia entry for the book:
God's Bits of Wood is a 1960 novel by Ousmane Sembène that concerns a railroad strike in colonial Senegal of the 1940s. The book deals with several ways that the Senegalese responded to colonialism. There are elements that tend toward accommodation, collaboration, or even idealization of the French colonials. At the same time the story details the strikers who work against the mistreatment the Senegalese face. It was written in French under the title Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. The novel was translated in to English in 1962 and published by William Heinemann. [read more]The series on structural racism in fiction started last year with an inquiry from Andrew Grant-Thomas, who offered a working definiton of the phenomenon.
Snitch Jacket "is a thriller packed full of rich situations and even richer characters, and the fact that it is also very funny does not detract from the life-and-death action," Matthew Lewin wrote in the Guardian: "This is a remarkably assured debut from ... Goffard, who writes like an angel and plots like a demon."Benny Bunt is an ex-speed freak, a helplessly dominated husband, a misfit on the sun-bleached, fog-drenched streets of Southern California, and a barfly who makes pocket money snitching on his friends. You will like him.Read the Page 99 Test: Snitch Jacket.
‘Everybody knows that California sunshine is the world’s loneliest light,’ says Benny, who inhabits an underworld of desperados and grotesques and spends much of his free time at the Greasy Tuesday, a squalid neighbourhood dive teeming with legends.
One night, one of these legends walks through the door: Gus ‘Mad Dog’ Miller, a huge, tattoo-laden Vietnam vet who sports a necklace of severed ears and is said to have lobotomised a gang of Viet Cong with a single chopstick. Benny soon finds himself entranced by this twisted Falstaffian personality. Six months later, Benny is arrested on suspicion of double murder after attending the freak ‘Howling Head’ festival in the Mojave Desert.
Goffard, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, now lends his considerable talent to fiction, bringing to life the darker side of west coast counter-culture through a colourful array of bizarre, ribald characters. Snitch Jacket will be a delight for fans of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Hunter S Thompson, and Benny Bunt will definitely give the Coen brothers’ The Dude a run for his money.
Today's feature item at the Page 69 Test: Chip Heath and Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.Mark Twain once observed, “ A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas — businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others — struggle to make their ideas “stick.”
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.”
In this indispensable guide, we discover that “sticky” messages of all kinds — from the infamous “organ theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a product vision statement from Sony — draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of idea success stories (and failures) — the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher’s simulation that actually prevented prejudice . Provocative, eye-opening, and funny, Made to Stick shows us the principles of successful ideas at work — and how we can apply these rules to making our own messages “stick.”
Read reviews and an excerpt from the book at the official Made to Stick website.
Rachel Kadish, author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, answered my query about her current reading with mention of just a a few of the books she's into.Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters -- and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day -- has never before been fully told. Twenty years in theVisit Rachel Kadish's official website.making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era -- Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them -- she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne -- but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. Its publication is destined to become an event in American biography.
Here's the set-up for Chris Grabenstein's Slay Ride:Two weeks before Christmas, Scott Wilkinson goes on a routine business trip. The young advertising executive calls for a car service to take him from his home in the New Jersey suburbs to the airport.So who would play Nicolai Kyznetsoff — and the FBI agent who takes him on — in the film version of Slay Ride?
But, the driver is late. When he finally shows up, he drives like a maniac — frantically changing lanes, tailgating, narrowly avoiding collisions. Scott feels lucky to reach the airport alive.
Then, he makes a big mistake. He calls the limousine company to complain. Customer service assures him the bad driver will be "dealt with."
But this driver is worse than bad. He is pure evil. Nicolai Kyznetsoff may look and sound like all the anonymous drivers who whisk successful young executives back and forth to the airport all day. But the man behind the wheel of this particular Lincoln Town Car is something much more sinister: a psychotic Santa Claus, an avenging dark angel who will stop at nothing to wreak revenge on the one man he holds responsible for ruining his life.
Last Monday's feature at the Page 69 Test was Joe R. Lansdale's Lost Echoes.Since a mysterious childhood illness, Harry Wilkes has experienced horrific visions. Gruesome scenes emerge to replay themselves before his eyes. Triggered by simple sounds, these visions occur anywhere a tragic event has happened. Now in college, Harry feels haunted and turns to alcohol to dull his visionary senses. One night, he sees a fellow drunk easily best three muggers. In this man, Harry finds not only a friend that will help him kick the booze, but also a sensei who will teach him to master his unusual gift. Soon Harry’s childhood crush, Kayla, comes and asks for help solving her father’s murder. Unsure of how it will affect him, Harry finds the strength to confront the dark secrets of the past, only to unveil the horrors of the present.Among the advance praise for the novel:
In this superior East Texas crime thriller from Stoker-winner Lansdale (Sunset and Sawdust), Harry Wilkes discovers after a severe childhood ear infection that he has a peculiar "hindsight." Harry can not only see dead people but see and hear violent events as they occurred in the recent or distant past. "It's like I hear and see ghosts in sounds," he tells his father. By the time he's a college student, Harry's psychic abilities have driven him to booze. After meeting alcoholic Tad Peters, a retired martial arts expert, Harry becomes Tad's surrogate son and student. The two forge a pact to sober up together. Their resolve is tested when Harry agrees to help Kayla Jones, an old childhood crush now a cop, solve her father's murder, which her boss, the local police chief, has dismissed as a suicide. Lansdale's down-home prose erupts with explosive twists and razor sharp insights into how "echoes from the original sounds" can never be silenced until action is taken to defeat the fear that created them.
--Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThe prolific Lansdale returns, after sojourns in pulp, sf, and horror, to work his peculiar mojo on the supernatural crime thriller. Harry Wilkes has inherited his family’s curse of experiencing "dark sounds," full-sensory recordings of traumatic events that can be unleashed by, for example, the banging of a toilet lid upon which a guy once blew his brains out. Booze helps hold the "ghosts in the noise" at bay, but his life as a drunken recluse isn’t going well. He gets things under control with the help of an eccentric sensei named Tad, but when a boyhood girlfriend named Kayla comes home to find her father’s killer, Harold grits his teeth and journeys into the dark once more. Lansdale’s prose finds the perfect pitch between the laid-back cadences of front-porch storytelling and the thriller’s demand for growing urgency. He is a bit unreconstructed when it comes to gender relations — or at least the vocabulary to describe them — but he’s got both the charisma and the balls to pull it off. Funny and scary, with a barn-burner ending.
--Booklist
Read an excerpt from Lost Echoes and check out Joe R. Lansdale's official website.
Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Sandra Parshall's just-released Disturbing the Dead.Tom Bridger, who is half Melungeon, thought he had escaped his Virginia mountain community's lingering prejudice against the mixed-race group when he left to join the Richmond Police Department. Tom was moving up the detective ranks when a family tragedy brought him back home and moved him into his father's job as chief deputy in the Mason County Sheriff's Department. Now the bones of a Melungeon woman who disappeared ten years ago have surfaced on a remote mountaintop, and all evidence points to murder. Violence escalates as the victim's poor family and the wealthy white family she married into scramble to protect their secrets from Tom's scrutiny. As he probes into his father's investigation of the case, he finds his father was not the man he idolized.Visit Sandra Parshall's official website and read an excerpt from Disturbing the Dead.
The woman Tom is falling in love with, Rachel Goddard, is struggling to start a new life in a place that holds no memories for her. She puts herself in danger when she befriends the dead Melungeon woman's teenage niece, Holly. As a child, the girl witnessed something that could implicate her aunt's killer, but she is too terrified to tell anyone what she knows. While Rachel is determined to keep Holly safe and help her piece together past events, the guilty are equally determined to silence the girl -- and Rachel too, if necessary.
Will this murder investigation be Tom's and Rachel's undoing or will it free them to look to the future?
Daniel Drezner has an interesting post at Open University:Clever enough, but read on: Drezner has some intelligent things to say about the sociology of knowledge, what that has to do with how he does his work, and why his better book won't make him nearly as wealthy as the author of a lesser thesis.The Economist was good enough to review my new book All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes in their latest issue. Even better, the magazine liked the book.
However, with my shameless self-promotion out of the way, there's one paragraph of the review that made me contemplate how I framed the book:
Mr Drezner believes that what really matter [in determining the development of international regulatory regimes] are the domestic preferences of powerful governments: "States make the rules." This directly contradicts Thomas Friedman's flat-world notion that globalisation has emasculated the state. Mr Friedman's ideas -- such as that capitalists worldwide now form an "electronic herd" that tramples down borders -- are, according to Mr Drezner, "simple, pithy and wrong". As evidence, Mr Drezner provides case studies ranging from internet protocols to anti-retroviral drugs. He shows that "great powers cajole and coerce those who disagree with them into accepting the same rulebook."I've found my own way to thank the Economist for the review, but I now realize that I owe someone else a debt of gratitude -- Thomas Friedman.
On 19 March, 1987, Ian Rankin got caught in a sudden snow storm walking home from work. He stopped off at his local Tesco to buy a steak and a good bottle of red, because he'd had a book published that day. It was a novel called Knots & Crosses, and was about a detective called John Rebus.
The novelist Richard Gwyn came up with a list of "books in which things end badly" for the Guardian.Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaRead more about the list.
You would have thought it was bad enough to wake up and find oneself transformed into a huge bug, but for Gregor Samsa worse was to come. His first concern is that he has turned into woodlouse-man, but is rapidly overtaken by the fear that this might make him late for work. Because of his condition, he is forced to remain in his room, and his family has to take in lodgers to compensate for the loss of income. Thus abandoned, he dies a miserable death, alone and neglected.
Brian Freeman's psychological suspense novels feature detectives Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial.
Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Jon Clinch's highly acclaimed debut novel, Finn.Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.Read an excerpt from Finn, and visit Clinch's official website and his blog.
Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.
Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity – not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.
Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
Deidre Lynch, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, is the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Austen's Persuasion.Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future.Page 99: Persuasion.
Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances.
Jane Austen's last completed novel features a heroine much older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and presents a more intimate and sober tale of a love found long after such happiness had been deemed hopeless. This edition includes an appendix giving the original ending of Persuasion.
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