Book reviews, book-related news and author interviews
Updated: 46 min 1 sec ago
Fri, 06/18/2010 - 15:00
Never ones to take a list sitting down, today The Telegraph responds to The New Yorker’s list of top novelists under 40 with a list of their own:Given the fact that it has been nearly a decade since Granta’s last “Best of Young British Novelists” list, we set ourselves the challenge of coming up with a selection of novelists to rival the New Yorker’s. In compiling our list we have taken
Thu, 06/17/2010 - 03:36
OK, I’ll put it right out there: The Passage (Ballantine) is certainly the best read of the summer -- and possibly the best read of the year. To all of you who haven’t had the pleasure, don’t believe it when anyone tells you this is another vampire book. Because (a) it’s so very much not. And (b) it’s not “another” anything.Let’s get this out of the way right now: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
Tue, 06/15/2010 - 21:00
There is something heartbreaking and prescient about The Fate of Nature (Thomas Dunne Books) even though, despite the subtitle, it isn't actually about cleaning up the Earth. Rather award-winning author Charles Wohlforth (The Whale and the Supercomputer) uses his native Alaska as a lens of possibility. Still, while over 100 million gallons of crude has poured into the Gulf of Mexico, doing untold
Tue, 06/15/2010 - 19:15
In the slash and burn atmosphere that the book business has been of late, it’s great to have some good news. Today that was announced in the form of Mulholland Books, a new imprint of Little, Brown and Company that seems determined to bring highly readable fiction to as many readers as possible.Our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, has the full story here.
Sun, 06/13/2010 - 23:20
Want to write a novel? A coffee shop might be just the place to do it, at least that was part of the rationale behind Canada’s first Coffee Shop Author contest, which saw determined Canadian writers hunkering down with lattes and laptops all across the country. From The Toronto Star:Forty-two Canadians entered the online contest, promising to write most of their submissions -- poetry, novels,
Sun, 06/13/2010 - 21:45
January Magazine contributing editor Ali Karim takes another run at reading electronically and on Apple’s iPad for our sister publication, The Rap Sheet:There are many people in publishing who are bewildered by the rapid technological advances that are having an impact on their troubled industry. Despite being a “techno” guy, I have been equally resistant to the lure of digital e-books. I simply
Thu, 06/10/2010 - 17:39
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher’s Bee (Princeton Architectural Press) is an other worldly look at one of our most important species: the bee. There is little in Fisher’s book beyond bee: these are macro photographs -- some of them magnified as much as 5000x -- that show us bees as they have never before been seen. The resulting book is more like an art installation than a book about bees: you come
Thu, 06/10/2010 - 07:34
In Animal Factory (St. Martin’s Press) David Kirby (Evidence of Harm) asks some thought-provoking questions. One of the scariest of them is this: will anyone want to listen?Many Americans have no idea where their food comes from, and many have no desire to find out .... The willful ignorance of our own food's provenance is curious, given our Discovery Channel-like fascination with the way in
Wed, 06/09/2010 - 23:10
The prolific and talented M.J. Rose has long been known to January Magazine. To us, sometimes she feels like a personal discovery. Back in the late 1990s, we were among the first to review her self-published novel, Lip Service. So it’s pleasing to be able to report that, more than a decade on, this author just keeps getting better and better.We see this clearly in her latest outing, The Hypnotist
Wed, 06/09/2010 - 16:07
Lovers of mass-market literature, take note: Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first “dime novel”: Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. As The Writer’s Almanac observes:Most dime novels were filled with crime, violence, and romance. They were mostly set in America during romanticized periods in the nation’s short history -- the Revolutionary
Tue, 06/08/2010 - 11:00
Back in 2006, the whole January Magazine crew liked David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim’s original Intellectual Devotional, a book intended to offer a sort of gymnasium for the mind where a reader would come, on a daily basis, for a new and refreshing piece of information.Intellectual Devotional: Biographies (Rodale) is the fourth book in the now popular series. “Revive your mind,” a cover line
Mon, 06/07/2010 - 16:00
And so we come to the end, the third book in Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. First came The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then The Girl Who Played with Fire and now The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Larsson, who died after submitting Nest, did not see his books take the world publishing stage by storm, and what a shame. In a way, these novels -- with their tight, outrageous
Sat, 06/05/2010 - 08:19
A couple of years ago, we liked The NFL Gameday Cookbook quite a lot, even though it was clear that the book didn’t focus precisely on author chef Roy Lampe’s area of expertise. However Lampe’s Ribs, Chops, Steaks & Wings (Chronicle) focuses on just that and very tightly. Before very long it’s clear that this is the book that Dr. BBQ was meant to write. Vegetarians can run for cover, but Fox does
Fri, 06/04/2010 - 20:30
One of Australia’s best loved authors, Elizabeth Jolley (1924-2007), was widely read and celebrated internationally, but has had limited exposure to American readers. Persea Books is trying to change that with the publication of a trilogy of autobiographical novels in one handsome volume.My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever have been out of print in the United States for a long time, but the third
Fri, 06/04/2010 - 16:00
Having grown up in a household filled with books, and with parents and grandparents who were dedicated readers, it seems so obvious to me that having written works around promoted my boyhood interest not only in reading, but in learning, in general. However, it may take myriad academic studies to convince other people of the same thing. If so, they should look to these findings, reported in Salon
Thu, 06/03/2010 - 19:31
The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list of fictionists worth watching is likely to become a who’s who in publishing over the next decade. At least, that’s what happened in 1999, the last time the magazine put together a similar list. The list that The New Yorker cooked up that year really were watching: in fact, a lot of us have been watching most of them ever since. It included Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge
Wed, 06/02/2010 - 18:46
Broadcaster and art historian Carole Enahoro's debut is darkly, wickedly funny and deeply thought-provoking. In that regard -- in many regards -- it is a perfect book.In Doing Dangerously Well (Random House Canada) a dam collapses in Nigeria and kills thousands of villagers. The tragedy sets the stage for a different kind of flood as all sorts of people put out a hand to try and collect on the
Wed, 06/02/2010 - 16:34
There’s something deliciously industrious about Globish (W.W. Norton), novelist, journalist and premature curmudgeon Robert McCrum’s take on how English took over the world. McCrum sums things up in the prologue:Globish is a book about a phenomenon so obvious and all-pervading that it is sometimes taken for granted. It begins with the origins, and examines the basic elements of Early English that
Tue, 06/01/2010 - 12:00
Anyone who ever dreamed of a wedding, dreamed of one of these weddings: society confections quite beyond the means -- and perhaps even imaginations -- of mere mortals. Yet somehow, the perfection and expense displayed in the dozen weddings profiled here does nothing to detract from both the usefulness and beauty of Weddings (Gibbs Smith).Author Tara Guérard calls herself an “event designer” and,
