Peter Sillem is Editor-in-Chief Non-Fiction at S. Fischer Verlag, a German publishing house founded in 1886. He is the author of a book on melancholia in Early Modern Europe and lives in Frankfurt with his wife and two young children. To see which titles Peter has chosen as his Books of the Decade, click below.
Keith Kahn-Harris works as a sociologist, researcher, writer and music critic. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College, an associate lecturer for the Open University and the convenor of New Jewish Thought. He has written on a variety of topics, including Judaism, music scenes, heavy metal, transgression, Israel, communities, dialogue, religion, ethnicity, political discourse, and denial. You can find his contributions to the Guardian’s Comment is Free here. Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (2003) Okay, this was first published in 1972, but the English translation appeared in 2003. If she is heard of at all, the Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson is known in the English-speaking world for the Moomin books. The Summer Book shows her to have been (she died in 2001) an author of mature works of extraordinary subtlety and power. The Summer Book recounts the conversations and “adventures” of an old women and her six-year-old granddaughter spending the summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. It is a …
Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. His academic interests led him from physics to philosophy via theology (he began his professional life as a priest in the Church of England). He went freelance ten years ago and now writes regularly for the Guardian, The Philosophers’ Magazine, TLS, Financial Times and New Statesman, alongside a range of business titles, including Management Today. He also broadcasts, notably on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Mark’s most recent book is Plato’s Podcasts: The Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living. You can hear a podcast about that book by clicking here. His other publications include: Wellbeing, After Atheism, The Philosophy of Friendship, and Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life. On Religion, John Caputo (2001) This book appeared in 2001. Had those folk who waged battle in the God wars of the decade read it first, we might have had a more informed debate. Caputo aims to do a difficult thing: define religion. He does so with great verve, seeing that at heart, religion is a form of …
Andy Beckett studied modern history at Oxford University and journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. For his first, widely praised book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002), he was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2009 he published a major new history of the political landscape of Britain in the 1970s: When the Lights Went Out. Reviewing the book, Hanif Kureishi praised Beckett for his “avid eye and novelistic flair for detail” and concluded “Beckett’s excellent account of the 1970s is a necessity if we want to understand now as well as then”. You can hear an interview with Andy Beckett in which he discusses the book here. Since 1993, he has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Independent on Sunday and the London Review of Books. For the last twelve years, he has been a feature writer at the Guardian. He lives in London. Click below to see which titles Andy has chosen as his Books of the Decade.
Tony Bruce has spent pretty much his entire working life in books. First at Stockbridge Bookshop in Edinburgh (still going strong), followed by a stint at the epicentre of bookselling at Waterstones, Charing Cross Road (sadly no longer) before becoming manager of Waterstones at Goldsmiths College. Having had enough of bookselling he moved to Routledge in 1994, where he is now Publisher for the Philosophy list. He enlivens the routines of academic publishing by occasionally commissioning trade books, most recently with The Philosopher’s Dog by Raimond Gaita and The War for Children’s Minds by Stephen Law. He lives in Bath. A Lie About My Father, John Burnside (2006) A deeply thoughtful book, full of hurting, damage and repetition. It is a searing portrayal of first a father and then a son caught in an alcoholic and drugged loop of self-destruction. Yet it is as far as one can imagine from the recent slew of self-indulgent “misery memoirs”. Burnside’s compassion comes through on every page; he does not forgive his father but somehow refrains from judging …
Katy Derbyshire is a translator and co-editor of city-lit Berlin (with Heather Reyes, who recently featured in Podularity podcast 36). She writes biased and unprofessional reports on German books, translation issues and life in Berlin at her blog, love german books. Katy fell in love with German literature despite studying it at university, and was lured to Berlin in 1996 by a man, music and low rents. She stayed and now has a different man, a daughter and a lack of shelf space. Inka Parei, Die Schattenboxerin This is a wonderfully confusing short novel about a woman losing and finding herself in post-1989 Berlin. At first it reads like a detective story, but the psychology becomes more and more complex until the reader is just as disoriented as the protagonist. What I love about it is the way it captures the sad settings of East Berlin in the early 90s: decaying factories, a tumbledown former fairground, an all but vacant house. And the interim mood after the Wall had fallen but before the city became …
Steve Lake is a producer for the Munich-based jazz and classical music record label, ECM, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, and co-author (with Paul Griffiths) of a book about the company, Horizons Touched (Granta, 2007). He has written about music for many international magazines and newspapers, and about literature for Germany’s Akzente. His recent record productions include albums with saxophonists Evan Parker and Roscoe Mitchell, and with singer Judith Berkson, whose ECM debut will be released in 2010. Shirley Collins, America over the Water (SAF Publishing, 2004) Touching memoir of Sussex singer Shirley Collins’s personal and professional alliance with Texan folklorist Alan Lomax, and of their revelation-packed collecting trip through the American South in 1959. In Como, the then-unknown Fred McDowell walked out of the Mississippi forest to dazzle them with his bottleneck guitar playing. In Virginia their tape reels captured the rippling clawhammer banjo of Wade Ward. On the Parchman Farm prison camp Lomax recorded work songs (which would resurface –half a century later – on the “O Brother Where Art Thou” …
This is the second in an occasional series in which I ask an interviewee three questions – no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. This time my guest is writer, Robert Rowland Smith, who has just published a book entitled Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life. I rather like the exclamation mark and semi-colon behind Robert’s shoulder, unintentional though they were! Click on the book cover above to find out more about Robert’s book. A podcast interview – in which I get to ask Robert more than three questions – is coming soon.
Christopher Potter, after a distinguished career in publishing of over two decades, published his own first book this year: You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, which the Sunday Times called “wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years” and which New Scientist praised for its “crisp, authoritative writing and deft handling of difficult subjects”. In August, Christopher appeared in programme 29 on Podularity – “A Walk across the Universe” – which you can listen to by clicking here. [Author photograph: © Joyce Ravid] Philip Roth: The Humbling (2009) The Humbling is Philip Roth’s seventh novel of this decade, and though far from being his finest, even Roth under par is more appealing to me than the work of almost anyone else alive and writing today. The Human Stain, published at the beginning of this decade, still resonates in my mind. With another novel already promised for 2010 – Nemesis – we can only hope for another decade of astonishing fecundity. Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of …
Continuing our series in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of the past ten years, today’s guest is Kirsten Ellis. Kirsten is the author of Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope (Harper Collins). She is currently writing an historical novel and completing her MPhil/PhD in Creative Writing and teaching at Goldsmiths University. From the reviews of Star of the Morning: “In Ellis’s account… we have a very different Hester Stanhope [from previous accounts]: a woman who has inherited the mantle of her Prime Minister forebears (William Pitt the Younger was her uncle; Pitt the Elder her grandfather), showing due leadership, courage under fire, and a mission to count in the imperial power games being played in the East.” Lesley McDowell, The Scotsman “Ellis has unearthed fresh material, and retells the story with idiosyncratic panache… Ellis is a vivid narrator with an eye for detail: the perfumed dinners attended by naked female slaves; the dusk return of the swallows to the Umayyad mosque.” Sara Wheeler, Daily Telegraph To see …
