All posts filed under: literature

Books of the Decade – Rebecca Carter

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Rebecca Carter is an editor of fiction and non-fiction at the Random House imprint Harvill Secker, a list that aims to continue the tradition, once announced in an advertisement for Secker, of publishing “international quality literature with a wayward streak”. She has a particular love of unusual narrative history, and novels that explore hidden corners of the past (or present). Of her ‘books of the decade’ only Némirovsky’s Suite Française is published by her. Other books she has edited include Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes, Gerard Woodward’s August trilogy, Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow, Diana Evans’s 26a, Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, Faïza Guène’s Just Like Tomorrow, Tim Butcher’s Blood River and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers. Saira Shah – The Storyteller’s Daughter: one woman’s return to her lost homeland (2003) Early on in the decade, post 9/11, there was a scramble among publishers to find books that would illuminate for readers the situation in Afghanistan. One of the first, and …

Books of the Decade – Luke Brown

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Although we are now in a new decade, we haven’t yet reached Chinese new year. I am taking comfort from this fact, since  I am still putting up Books of the (past) Decade choices. And of course the books that were worth reading in 2009 are still worth reading in 2010. Enough self-exculpation. I promise that if you contributed to the series, your contribution is greatly appreciated and will appear on the site before long. Today’s guest chooser is Luke Brown. Luke Brown is an editor at Tindal Street Press, where he’s worked since 2002, publishing such authors as Catherine O’Flynn and Anthony Cartwright. He was born in Fleetwood, Lancashire, and has lived in Birmingham for over a decade. Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley (2002) “This is a dive-bar in the American style.” Carmel narrates a barmaid’s life of “wild disingenuousness” in some of the most beautiful, poetic prose I’ve read. Surrounded by romantics and fantasists, afflicted by a painful childhood and endless Manchester drizzle, she keeps herself together with superbly poised wit and her …

39. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears

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I first became aware of Stephen Asma‘s book on the fine Washington Post Book World podcast (which sadly is no more). The Post also chose the book as one of its top non-fiction titles of the year for 2009, calling it “a safari through the many manifestations of our idea of the monstrous”. Their reviewer went on: “I have seldom read a book that so satisfyingly achieves such an ambitious goal.” And indeed the book is much more than a mere freakish parade of monsters (though that is a part of its pleasure) – it is rather an investigation of the meaning of monsters. Why do all societies have their monsters? What do they help us cope with? How has the significance of monsters changed as societies have gone from polytheism to monotheism and on through the Enlightenment? And which of our current fears will our future monsters embody? Asma is clearly something of a polymath – not only did he produce many of the illustrations in the book himself, he also combines his academic …

Books of the Decade – Michael Bywater

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Michael Bywater is an author and broadcaster whose recent books include Lost Worlds (Granta, 2004), Big Babies (Granta, 2006), and – with Kathleen Burk – Is This Bottle Corked?: The Secret Life of Wine. He writes regularly for the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and numerous other publications. He is a regular broadcaster for the BBC. Scarlett Thomas – The End of Mr Y (2007) The Noughties produced a series of fine and strange novels on the strange relationship between the living and the dead, starting with Will Self’s How The Dead Live (2000) and including Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005), The Brief History of the Dead (Kevin Brockmeier 2007). But the star of the show was, for me, Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2007), an astounding, hypnotic compendium of computer-game, urban fantasy, dreamscape and sheer magic, incorporating a discourse on homoeopathy, a meditation on Heidegger and Derrida, a love stronger than death, and the sexiest, stroppiest, most wilful and clever heroine of the last decade, her first-person narrator Ariel Manto. I …

Books of the Decade – Andrew Kahn

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Andrew Kahn is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford in Russian and Classics. His scholarly research draws on his wide-ranging interests in European literature, most especially Greek, Latin and French. In addition to writing about Pushkin, whom he talked about on Podularity in programme 21, “In Pushkin’s Library”, he works on Enlightenment literature in Russia and Europe, on the history of ideas, the comparative reception of European culture in Russia, travel writing, the history of translation, and twentieth-century poetry. Here are Andrew’s three favourite books from the last decade: Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (2009) The contemporary of Milosz, and somewhat overshadowed by him in the West, Herbert seen in the unity of his poetic creation is one of the most biting and elegant ironists of the twentieth century.  His alter ego, Pan Cogito, ranks with Kafka’s K. as a haunting witness to oppressive systems.  Yet many poems convey Herbert’s acute visual imagination and his …

Books of the Decade – Andrew Kelly

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Andrew Kelly is the Director of the Bristol Festival of Ideas and other projects. He is the author and editor of 12 books including Filming All Quiet on the Western Front, Cinema and the Great War, Queen Square: biography of a place, Brunel: in love with the impossible. Of the many hundreds of books I have read in the past decade, three stand out. But could I mention too the series of letters by T E Lawrence that Jeremy and Nicole Wilson at Castle Hill Press are producing. They are defenders of the Lawrence flame, and have already published the definitive and most elegant edition of Lawrence’s classic work, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But the letters are something different and new. A painfully slow process – given the high standards of research and editorial work demanded – this is turning into one of the finest series ever published, bringing to life a complex and brave man. And can I thank the (mostly small) publishers of the works of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Hans Fallada …

37. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

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I’m delighted to say that the first Podularity podcast of 2010 is devoted to an in-depth interview with 2009 Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel in which she talks about her remarkable novel, Wolf Hall. As far as I can tell, this is the most extensive interview about the book available anywhere on the web. Here’s Hilary Mantel on her decision to write about Thomas Cromwell: “Very much I wanted to write about Cromwell. There isn’t any other figure I would have picked; he was the main attraction because I was really interested in the path he took from very humble origins, to the Councils of State, to be the king’s right-hand man, to be an earl. Other people rise from a humble background but they invariably come through the Church. “Cromwell didn’t take that path. He very much created the conditions in which he could succeed, but by doing so [also created] a huge backwash of resentment and ill-will, which I suppose in his own mind must have seemed indefeasible at times. “He had the …

Three questions for… Mary Beard

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Mary Beard is no stranger to Podularity. In fact, she may have appeared on it more times than any other author. This however is her Podularity video debut. Last autumn, after recording an audio interview with Mary about her book-of-the-blog, It’s a Don’s Life, I asked her to take part in my “Three Questions for” series of short films. The format is as simple as the name suggests – three questions, no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. So click below to find out where Mary thinks the Elgin marbles belong, why she chose the Romans over the Greeks, and which book she thinks everyone should have to read before they leave school – it’s not, it turns out, a Latin one…

Books of the Decade – Roland Chambers

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Roland Chambers studied film and literature in Poland and at New York University before returning to England in 1998. His first biography, The Last Englishman, won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature, and draws on his experience both as a children’s author and as a private investigator specializing in Russian politics and business. He currently divides his time between London and Connecticut. You can hear my audio interview with Roland by clicking here. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz A fat, fantasy and science fiction nerd spread-eagled between New Jersey, his grandma in the Dominican Republic, and the voodoo of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Messiah-cum-sacrificial cow, Oscar is devastating, as is his author, Junot Diaz: brilliance on every level. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi A so-called graphic novel (it’s an autobiography) which gives Iran since the Revolution through the childhood, adolescence and coming of age of Marji, author of perhaps the most influential comic since Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan Pollan shows how far we are from what we …

Books of the Decade – Roger Luckhurst

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Roger Luckhurst is professor of modern and contemporary literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. His many publications include a study of J.G. Ballard’s fiction, editions of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for Oxford World’s Classics, and many works on Victorian and genre fiction. He is currently working on The Mummy’s Curse and other Dastardly Tales of Egyptian London, of which he says: “This book will explore the true story of the curse of the British Museum mummy, first brought to prominence in about 1904 with the death of the journalist Fletcher Robinson, and which haunted the Edwardian imagination, preparing the way for the later frenzy around the tomb of Tutankhamen.” To see which books Roger has chosen as his books of the decade, click below: