Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? [Nextbook]

Existential crisis novel wins first ‘Arabic Booker’: A $50,000 prize styling itself as the Arabic Booker has been awarded for the first time. At a ceremony in Abu Dhabi last night, the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction went to Egyptian author Baha Taher for his novel Sunset Oasis. [Guardian]

English poetry masters: John Milton: Telegraph.co.uk’s week-long series celebrating the great poets of the English canon. Today, Sam Leith profiles the highly influential poet of the English revolution, John Milton. [Telegraph]

March 12th, 2008 at 9:09 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

Less science, more fiction from Arthur C Clarke Award: The shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, announced earlier today, suggests a broad definition of the genre. Along with tales of androids and genetic engineers, the six books nominated this year include prize-winning literary fiction, a novel for young adults, and what has been described as “a postmodern psychological mash-up”. [Guardian]

Western Authors Celebrate a Master: Mostly, they called him Wally. The use of Wallace Stegner’s nickname was in keeping with the familiar, almost familial tone of last weekend’s gathering of writers — mostly Western writers — seeking new relevance in the work of this protean author some 15 years after his death and a month after what would have been his 99th birthday. [NYT]

March 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

A Family Tree of Literary Fakers: Here follows a lineup of some of the past few decades’ most notorious fakes, with proof that in some cases, there are second acts in American lives. [NYT]

We are, literally, stereotypical: The British buy books by television personalities, Americans are obsessed with self-improvement, French choices are more highbrow, the Germans like holidays while the Japanese have more eclectic tastes. If it were not for Harry Potter, the survey by Amazon of global reading tastes would look like a very lazy exercise in national stereotyping. [Times]

March 9th, 2008 at 10:19 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

Boy A wins talking point award: Jonathan Trigell’s controversial novel Boy A has been named as the first winner of the Book to Talk About award, announced to coincide with World Book Day. The award, decided by members of the public, brings with it a prize of £5,000 for a work which inspires debate and discussion among readers. The novel is a sympathetic account of a young man released from prison after committing an appalling crime as a child. [Guardian]

Flying Off the Shelves, The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves: This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me. It might have belonged to an unscrupulous used bookseller who sent the homeless out, Fagin-like, to do his bidding, or it might have been another book thief helping a semi-illiterate friend identify the valuable merchandise. I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski’s Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry: He bellowed, “You’re just a little bitch, ain’t'cha?” and stormed out. [The Stranger]

March 6th, 2008 at 3:42 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

The lure of made-up memoirs: Tuesday’s revelation that a critically acclaimed memoir of gang life in South Los Angeles was an elaborate hoax raises troubling questions about the economics of American publishing, about our collective deference to victims and about the paucity of real literature based on our most urgent urban experiences. [LA Times]

Bill Heinz Was a Writer to Relish: In 1946, Damon Runyon was dying of throat cancer and could scarcely speak. A magazine editor asked him who, in his opinion, was the best young writer in New York. Runyon scrawled the name W.C. Heinz on a cocktail napkin and passed it to him. He had underlined Heinz’s name three times. [WSJ]

Riverhead Books announced yesterday that it is recalling all copies of Margaret Jones’s “Love and Consequences,” a supposed memoir about growing up among gangs in South Central Los Angeles that turns out to be fictional. Whenever a case like this comes to light, someone asks: Why don’t publishers fact-check their books? The basic answer is that it’s not practical. [NY Sun]

March 5th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

“Unlike journalism,” Mr. Hamill tells me, “fiction is about people one at a time.” And he seems determined to give readers a sample of every generation of New Yorkers since before the Revolution. [WSJ]

The ‘extraordiary’ diaries of an obscure Glasgow clerk who lived through the First World War and the Depression are set to become one of the publishing hits of the year. Tommy’s War contains the idiosyncratic musings of Thomas Cairns Livingstone, an otherwise unexceptional working class family man who set up home in the city’s Govanhill in 1913. Spanning some 20 years, Livingstone wrote his journal in a flowing copperplate, including passages in French and Latin, and illustrating it with quirky drawings. [Guardian]

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child who went on to live a gang-banger’s violent life, wielding guns and running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true. [NYT]

Against this cynicism, however, stands the fact that the greatest statesmen — the ones who occupy the most cherished places in our historical memory — are the ones who were great writers. President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill, to take the most familiar examples, occupy a higher plane than the average president or prime minister, partly because of the events they participated in, but also because of the way they interpreted those events in their speeches and writings. Politics and language, they proved, do not have to be sullen strangers — or sworn enemies, as they are in the realm of propaganda that George Orwell wrote about. On the contrary, reading Lincoln’s second inaugural or Churchill’s 1940 speeches, it becomes clear that the political and the literary converge at the highest levels. [NY Sun]

March 4th, 2008 at 10:56 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

New Jack Kerouac book to be published. A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the “Beat Generation” of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

Tom Rob Smith is worried by cranberries. In his three-storey apartment in south London’s converted Jam Factory, he is busy writing his second novel to a tight deadline. His first novel, Child 44, caused a lot of hoopla at the London Book Fair when, after a bidding war, it was sold in 22 countries and Ridley Scott bought the film rights. Child 44 is a thrilling, intense piece of fiction set in Stalin’s Russia. [Guardian]

Author admits making up memoir of surviving Holocaust. Eleven years after the publication of her best-selling Holocaust memoir - a heartwarming tale of a small Jewish girl trekking across Europe and living with wolves - the Massachusetts author yesterday admitted the whole story was a hoax. In a statement issued by her Belgian lawyer, Misha Defonseca of Dudley, whose book, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” has been translated into 18 languages and is the basis for a new French movie, “Survivre avec les Loups” (”Surviving With the Wolves”), confessed that she is not Jewish and that she spent the war safely in Brussels. [Boston Globe]

Nominees for the 28th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced Thursday, along with the winner of this year’s Robert Kirsch Award. Finalists in nine categories were unveiled at the National Arts Club in Manhattan by Kenneth Turan, a Times film critic and director of the Times Book Prizes, and David L. Ulin, Times book editor. The winners will be announced April 25 at UCLA’s Royce Hall as part of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. [LA Times]

March 1st, 2008 at 10:12 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

His mother, Hope, was beautiful and proud. “When my mother walked down the street,” the book begins, “men noticed.” Bridge was proud of her, in spite of the precarious life she led with him — full of dangerous men and angry landlords and bloody, botched suicides. Bridge describes his mother in the courtroom scene in which he was officially removed from her care. “My mother was twenty-four years old, descended from a line of impoverished women, educated to the tenth grade, abandoned by a husband, and plagued with fear. Standing at the judging bar, she must have recalled courtroom encounters from her own childhood. Now, a woman among her betters, she could do nothing more than be still and be judged.” Helping vulnerable people, especially children and women, would become his life’s work. [LA Times]

Stephen Marlowe, a prolific writer of popular fiction best known for his crime novels featuring the globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum, died on Friday in Williamsburg, Va. He was 79 and lived in Williamsburg. The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder, his wife, Ann, said. Mr. Marlowe wrote more than 50 novels in a range of genres, from crime to science fiction to historical fiction. The Chester Drum books combined elements of the hard-boiled detective story and the international espionage thriller. [NYT]

“The Fabulous Clipjoint” does for Chicago of the 1930s and ’40s what Jim Thompson did for the scruffy towns of Texas and California, and what Dashiell Hammett did for San Francisco — preserve forever, like bugs in amber, the seedy pleasures of our shared pasts. [Chicago Tribune]

February 28th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a small group of painters in Southern California made the region an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined an “L.A. Look” recognizable to this day; Los Angeles’s architects produced the most influential and winning collection of modernist houses ever built; its designers created America’s most seminal and enduring modern furniture designs; and its musicians mounted the only significant challenge to New York’s jazz supremacy in the past 60 years. A number of penetrating books… [Atlantic]

Anderson’s magnificent film fire bursts with the same kind of destructive energy — and the fascination with the hard, gritty detail of social and industrial processes — that marked Sinclair’s writing at its best. Indeed, Sinclair was not without big-screen ambitions of his own. He flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life, beginning in 1914 with a six-reel silent movie of his most famous novel, “The Jungle” (1906). [NYT]

After a debate that left senior members of the Telegraph’s literary staff with pulled hair, black eyes and, in one case, an infected bite, we this week present our list of the 50 great crime writers of all time. [Telegraph]

Here’s our ultimate comic book mix tape - title it Eight Comic Books You Need to Read Before You Die, or the only slightly less cumbersome Comics for People Who Think They Hate Comics. [SFGate]

The more cynical may say it is a small price to pay for achieving the stature of intellectual celebrity, but Francis Fukuyama took some very hard knocks after the publication of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Some critics took the “end of history” part of the title altogether too literally and had a field day lampooning Fukuyama’s chronological hubris. [First Things]

Tim Jeal’s favourite childhood book was a memoir that turned out to be made up. The possibilities of biography have fascinated him ever since. [Guardian]

It’s hard to remember a first novel that’s had as big a push as Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children.” In addition to landing rapturous press, he’s been blurbed by A.M. Holmes and Jonathan Safran Foer. The novel, which centers on the disappearances of a comics-and-video-game-loving 12-year-old, is being hailed as the first great literary novel set in Las Vegas. Pretty good for a late-blooming author who spent 10 years writing his novel and compares the process to building a bomb in his basement. [LA Times]

Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died on Monday aged 85 was the leading light of the “new novel” in post-war France, as well as a film director and avant-garde critic whose theories were as influential as his novels. [Telegraph]

February 23rd, 2008 at 11:21 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.

While sales within America’s multibillion dollar book marketplace stagnate – Harry Potter excepted – the once somewhat disrespected world of self-publishing is blossoming. [Guardian]

Three years ago James Patterson, the creator of the blockbuster best-selling Alex Cross and “Women’s Murder Club” series, began “Maximum Ride,” a series for young adults about a group of genetically mutated kids who are part human, part bird. The idea, he said, was to get children to love reading — or at least to love reading his kind of books. [NYT]

Winning the prestigious George Polk award today was bittersweet vindication for investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. His book, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” was ignored by most major news organizations (including this one) when it was released in February 2007. [LA Times]

Flann O’Brien, the unsung Irish genius who belongs up there with Joyce and Beckett. [Slate]

Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry. [Psychology Today]

February 20th, 2008 at 10:09 am

This article is filed under Blog, Books.