TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Linklog: Stepping on bookshelves, capturing Nabokov, and more I really, really want one of these. But I shall have to move to somewhere with more than one floor first.• Book titles it could be difficult to ignore (especially if you're judging the Diagram prize): "Edison's Concrete Piano: Flying Tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes and 12 Other Flops from Great Inventors".• Nabokov captured in butterfly specimen cases. • Why would a Twilight vampire drive a Volvo? The power of product placement.• Almost certainly the best way to think of "The best way to think of".Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Cello Suites, Burmese memoir up for B.C. non-fiction prize Eric Siblin's acclaimed The Cello Suites and Globe writer Ian Brown's memoir of life with a disabled son are among the books nominated for Canada's richest non-fiction literary prize. cbc.ca |
Now that was a decade like no other The output of the geniuses at work at the turn of the last century is still part of the literary canonThere's been some self-satisfaction in the end-of-the-year literary press about the achievements of 2000 to 2009. But before we get too smug about the inaugural crop of 21st-century fiction, it might be advisable to make three concessions to posterity.First, never forget the ghost of Herman Melville, whose work was virtually unobtainable within 10 years of his death in 1891. It's a fair bet that these pre-Christmas lists will have neglected a number of writers who, 100 years hence, will be on every university syllabus. Second – a corollary – it's safe to assume that quite a few of the names and titles now being traded as literary bulls will almost certainly turn bearish.Finally, before we get too carried away by our own age of wonder, I'd like to contrast it with the extraordinary decade 1900 to 1910, aka Edwardian England. This tends to get overshadowed by the cataclysm of the First World War, but when you consider the catalogue of books that came out in this decade, it's hard not to be impressed by its originality, innovation and sheer mastery of narrative and dramatic prose. Its notable deaths – Oscar Wilde (1900), Anton Chekhov (1904) and Henrik Ibsen (1906) – also distinguish it as an age of literary greatness.The Edwardians, poised between the Victorian and the modern world, present two faces. Theirs was an age of electricity and psychoanalysis (Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900), but it was also the era of gaslights and jingoism (Erskine Childers's masterpiece The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903).The novels of the age have the same duality and Conrad and James capture this perfectly. There are characters in The Secret Agent (1907), for example "the Professor", who could have stepped from the pages of any major 20th-century thriller. The Wings of a Dove (1902) meditates on passion, money and media in a way that is, of course, Jamesian but utterly contemporary. This is also the decade that launched that great English novelist EM Forster. Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room With a View and The Longest Journey were all published by 1910. For me, Conrad's Nostromo (1904) is the towering novel of this strange decade, more radical in construction, thought and imagination than any of its contemporaries.So much for the high end. Almost as interesting is that clutch of works for younger readers (Peter Pan, The Railway Children and The Wind in the Willows) that would shape the imaginative landscape of the British child throughout the coming century. By the by, it's the bizarre, even tragic, lives of Kenneth Grahame, JM Barrie and E Nesbit that provide a starting point for AS Byatt's 2009 novel, The Children's Book. The hybrid marriage of the Victorian and the pre-modern has certainly produced some very strange fruit.Moving to the now equally remote world of boys' adventure stories, this is the decade of Conan Doyle's colossal bestseller The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Kipling's Kim, the ur-spy novel (1901) and Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), raw narratives of visceral appeal whose cinematic energy cry out for film adaptation.So much of Edwardian England seems spookily evocative of our times: rampant capitalism, technological innovation, global commerce and a general neurasthenic anxiety about the future. In a lyric reflection of this mood, Thomas Hardy turned, in one of the most remarkable genre shifts in English literature, from fiction to the consolations of poetry to produce perhaps the most influential body of work in 20th-century English verse.Hardy is a one-off and a Victorian. But there are many other Edwardians whose individual masterpieces should never be forgotten: Frederick Rolfe (Hadrian the Seventh); GK Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill); Hilaire Belloc (Cautionary Tales); and Edmund Gosse (Father and Son). In 1910, no survey of the previous decade could have guessed that the author of Love Among the Chickens (1906) would turn out to be that comic master, PG Wodehouse.Nor, of course, could anyone have foreseen the profound and lasting influence of that disparate bunch of awkward boys: Evelyn Waugh and Eric Blair (born 1903); Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood (1904); Samuel Beckett (1906); and WH Auden, who shares 1907 with Daphne du Maurier. To say nothing of Ian Fleming, who has just passed his 101st birthday.Playing it for l'oeufs this Christmas My quest for the Christmas gift book of 2009 has thrown up some pretty curious titles, but few could be curiouser, and possibly more addictive, than Mot d'Heures: Gousses, Rames "edited and annotated" by one Luis d'Antin van Rooten (I'm not making this up), a one-time Broadway actor and Disney cartoon voice who devoted his mature years to creating homonymic approximations of English nursery rhymes. Read aloud in the accents of Molière and Sarkozy, the making of the world's most famous omelette is a good example of van Rooten's art:Un petit d'un petitS'etonne aux HallesUn petit d'un petitAh! Degres te fallent...Only Patrick Janson-Smith of Blue Door books could be brave enough to reissue this eccentric little volume. At £9.99, it could be the stocking filler we've been looking for.Helen Mirren rides to Tolstoy's rescueThe poet and critic Jay Parini published The Last Station, his remarkable novel about Leo Tolstoy's final days, in 1990. Almost immediately, there was movie interest from the late Anthony Quinn, who wanted to play the tyrannical old count. Now, almost 20 years on, after many vicissitudes, The Last Station is about to reach the screen, starring Christopher Plummer, James McAvoy and Helen Mirren, whose queenly presence (and Russian instincts) has transformed the project into a winner – with many early whispers in America about Oscar nominations in 2010. Christmas seems to have come early for Parini, who is happily watching Canongate issue a film tie-in edition of the original novel. "At this rate," he joked before a screening in London last week, "they'll soon be publishing my poems as well."Robert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Onion: Our Front Pages 1988-2008 | Book review The Onion, America's satirical paper, comes of ageThe Onion, "America's Finest News Source", is 21 years old (or if you believe its own chronology, which has it founded by the bloodthirsty tyrant T Herman Zweibel in 1756, considerably older). To celebrate its ability to buy intoxicating liquor in the land of the free, the paper, vaguely the American equivalent of Private Eye, but with news channels and websites and vice-presidents, has put together two and a bit decades of front pages, the first response to which must be: "My, how you have grown."The Onion began as a student rag established by two first-year undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. The name came from one of their uncles, a comment on editorial lunches, which consisted of onion sandwiches on white bread. The first headlines were campus in-jokes, about stolen bikes and a UW-M professor of physics who had proven that the universe did not exist (in the celebrated equation "u=z, 'u' being the universe and 'z' being zilch"). The genius of the original paper was to incorporate on its front page a cut-out-and-keep strip of offer coupons for local student haunts – "75c off Cellar Subs! 2 Free Maytag washes!" – which made it a must-read publication.On the strength of this commercial clout it was sold after a year for a few thousand dollars to a pair of more ambitious students who pushed it out from campus to Milwaukee, Boulder, Chicago and beyond. The paper currently claims, possibly wildly, a circulation of 690,000; a million people apparently download its weekly podcast. It now comes complete with straight-up blurbs (something you can't quite imagine Private Eye succumbing to): from Neil Gaiman, of Sandman fame, who says it is "the smartest, best and most consistent humorous publication that America has ever produced", or the editor of the Washington Post, who says: "Long before Jon Stewart there was the Onion, making sense of nonsense, or vice versa."The various accounts of this success story tend to put it down to comic genius, and there was a bit of that, but looking through the past issues it is clear that nothing helped the Onion more than the arrival of Monica Lewinsky as an intern in the White House. As the presidential office became the focus for that staple of student gossip – did they or didn't they? – the Onion knew the territory from the off. Under the headline "Clinton denies Lewinsky allegations" the paper had the president stating, in "a terse, carefully worded statement": "We did not have sex, we made love. Sweet, sweet love." And going on to clarify: "These base allegations of a tawdry, superficial sexual involvement […] are completely unfounded. It went way beyond the physical. This was more than just the intertwining of two bodies. It was the union of two souls…"In the earlier years there had been some memorable scoops: "Restaurant cited for serving dead chickens" or "New Starbucks opens in restroom of existing Starbucks" or "God answers prayers of paralyzed little boy: 'No,' says God" or "Drugs win Drugs War". However, it was only with the arrival of William Jefferson Clinton and the Starr report, when America entered its decade of "you couldn't make it up" politics – hanging chads, W, shock and awe, and all the rest – that the Onion became essential reading.It had always had fun with the collapsing gap between human stories and global meltdown, the unhinging of perspective that has come to characterise the news. Thus "Gen. Tommy Franks quits army to pursue solo bombing projects" shares headline space with "Child in stroller stares at man in wheelchair" and "Five-disc jazz anthology still unopened". The Onion responded to 9/11 with the unarguable splash: "A shattered nation longs to care about stupid bullshit again".In the years that followed, it frequently seemed more credible than many official sources. Tales of foreign news sources following up Onion stories are legion: the "Harry Potter encourages Satanism" scare that went viral, Neil Armstrong coming clean about faking the moon landing.No satire is immune from its subject, though, and recently the Onion itself has been the subject of the recessionary cliches of redundancy and downsizing, to which it responded with a spoof buyout by an unnamed Chinese conglomerate. Stories of its demise are greatly exaggerated, however. Its response to Obama's election? "Black guy asks nation for change".Tim Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Poe Toaster' Is a No-Show A black-clad figure had shown up annually on Jan. 19, the author's birthday, to raise a cognac toast to his grave and deposit three red roses, along with the remnants of the cognac bottle. This year the toaster did not show up. feeds.nytimes.com |