Fiction

Book lovers are always pleased when water-cooler conversation turns to the latest phenomenon in which a novel or author has had the kind of popular success that extends far beyond the usual book reading public. The general tenor of such discussions runs along the dyspeptic lines of: ‘Why aren’t people reading better books?’ I have heard the following: ‘I find it really depressing when I see an adult reading a JK Rowling novel on the tube’, and ‘Steig Larsson may keep you turning the pages, but what a shame he died before his books could be properly edited.’ And as for Dan Brown and E L James, they have almost

The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell observed an, ‘ever-widening gap between the popular concept of a peer and the existing reality.’ He found greatest fault with nineteenth century novels and plays, ‘where a lord, silly or sinister, handsome or grotesque, is rarely allowed to strike a balance between extremes of conduct.’  Powell’s nineteenth century examples would certainly have included Gilbert and

Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to those of different inclinations. In all the dense weight of recollections and memorials published since Vidal’s death on Tuesday, I have not seen a sharper criticism of his writing and its preoccupations than that made by Spectator reader Walter Taplin in a letter to the magazine in 1982. ‘Sir, On page 13 of the Spectator

Whatever Mitt might think, if there’s one thing that makes us proud to be British, it’s the fact we’re not American. Alright, it’s true we don’t have a black president but we still think we’re cooler: less brash, more sarcastic and ready to give Tim Berners-Lee a starring role in the Olympic show. The differences are particularly obvious when it comes to the holy trinity of American life: guns, god and portion sizes. And Ben Fountain’s debut novel – at the age of 48, he’s a honed late developer after the excellent short story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (2006) – rips into all three over-indulgences. In Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,

Here is the Booker longlist, announced earlier this afternoon: The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre) Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker) The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books) Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday) Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories) Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate) The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt) Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury) Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber) Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate) As expected, the judges are clearly determined to avoid last year’s

London doesn’t really have a literary hipster scene, but if it did, Ned Beauman would be centre stage. The 27-year-old novelist may look like he’s crawled out of an evolution of man diagram, but he’s very clever and very trendy and, despite having gone to Cambridge, knows a lot about ketamine. His show-offy but energetic first book, Boxer Beetle, came out in 2010 to deafening acclaim and earnt him a six-figure publishing deal, unheard of in these austere times unless you’re a dog who’s won a talent contest. After spending a couple of years hanging out with cool, arty people in Brooklyn and Berlin, Beauman is back in town to

Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is a mystery ‘why people might want to read it [Fifty Shades of Grey] rather than Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Eye or any back issue of Cosmopolitan. And that’s to name but a few, and none of the masters like Henry Miller. As the Samizdat above tells you, assuming that you are in the market, go forth and find good smut. Please, anything but ‘it’. HT: @HypnoPeter

The sea has always been a powerful stimulant for the literary imagination, most famously, of course, for the likes of Messrs Hemingway and Melville. Both, indeed, are name-checked in Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago, a new addition to the canon of ocean-inspired work, taking the trope of the waters and recasting it for the twenty-first century. Gavin Weald has had his family torn apart by a flood, his Trinidad house ruined and, worse still, losing his son and seeing his wife incapacitated. He is left alone with his six-year-old daughter, Océan, to try and rebuild a life. At the start of the novel he returns to his refurbished house but realizes

Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976.  But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which won him the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and Lay of The Land, completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy. Canada, his seventh novel, begins in Montana in 1960. It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva, are sent to jail

Any idea what an Ouroboros is? It’s not the name of the cloud hanging over London at the moment but, according to Will Wilkinson, in his review of Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality on the Economist blog, a perfect symbol for the ‘progressive master narrative’ championed by a new technocratic coterie (which also counts Paul Krugman among its members). An ancient image of a snake consuming its own extremity, the Ouroboros is a fitting symbol for ‘progressives dizzy from chasing their tails’. Nobel prize winner, former head of economics at the World Bank and adviser to Clinton, Stiglitz is apparently in the perfect position to comment on the price

Reading a short story by Kevin Barry is a bit like listening to a kraut-rock-record from the 1970s. The foundations are built on a solid rhythm. Then every so often, the form veers left-field, unveiling a portal to a world of magic. In this sense, you could argue that Barry is an experimental writer. He spends considerable time wrestling with language, bending each turn of phrase and piece of dialogue into shape, until he’s convinced he can make it sing. As far as modulating with the form itself, Barry works from tradition: giving his readers short vignettes of isolated individuals — mostly men, who have failed in one way or

Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been bought for another purpose.   The Guardian dedicated their usually reliably highbrow Review section to the phenomenon, persuading some hilariously unexpected writers (Will Self! Jeanette Winterson! Lol!) to have a go at their own sex scenes. I couldn’t face reading them, but you can here. And if you’re really into masochism, here’s an angry blogpost

When Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished book (not quite a novel, not quite a novella) The Original of Laura was posthumously released in 2009, consternation over whether it was right to publish the work at all — Nabokov had instructed that it be destroyed after his death — swiftly gave way to consternation over what the work contained. And what the work contained was yet more evidence that Nabokov’s interest in very young girls was, well, something rather more than an interest.   Here was a figure who was not so much possessed of the ability to send planets spinning (Nabokov’s definition of the real writer) as he was the ability to

It is almost twelve months ago, following the below-par A Death in Summer, that I wondered aloud on these pages whether Benjamin Black (aka Booker-winner, John Banville) had what it took to write a crime series. A resounding yes comes in the form of the fifth instalment — sixth novel overall, after the 2008 stand-alone The Lemur — of the Quirke series, Vengeance. Black has finally rediscovered the formula that made his debut, Christine Falls, so memorable.   To be sure, crime fiction purists will still bemoan the absence of standard clue-laying. The novel begins with the suicide of businessman Victor Delahaye, witnessed by his business partner’s son, Davy Clancy,