By this author
‘A Mercy’ by Toni Morrison
arts
A Mercy sees America's last Nobel laureate for literature weighing in with her first novel in five years and returning to some of the themes explored in her most famous work, Beloved. Toni Morrison's ninth novel concerns the lives of …
‘The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book’ by Sherman Young
arts
This is a tidy manifesto which argues that, in the same way news has become separated from newspapers, and radio programs (think podcasting) from the radio, there is no reason why literature cannot be disentangled from the object of the book. Even for …
‘Miracles of Life’ by JG Ballard
arts
In the same way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez downplays elements of the fantastic in his work, JG Ballard's autobiography demonstrates how the 77-year-old's surreal fiction has consisted of the writer unpacking memories of his Shanghai boyhood in the years …
‘The Cleft’ By Doris Lessing
Gender
After making four Booker Prize shortlists and covering literary territory as diverse as science fiction, autobiography, libretti and non-fiction, the 87-year-old Doris Lessing now speculates on the moment when the human species became, as the novel's …
‘The Museum of Doubt’ by James Meek
arts
This is a hyperactive collection of eight short stories and a novella. There's the wolfish salesman Jack, vomiting a severed deer's head complete with antlers; the Queen of Ukraine, cooking pork in her New York hotel suite; and jailbird Melvin Menimonie, …
‘Fast, Loose Beginnings: A Memoir of Intoxications’ By John Kinsella
arts
The advance publicity for John Kinsella's memoir - which included restraining orders taken out against fellow poets Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence, and threats of defamation suits from that pair - promised an entertaining ride, but it is a promise …
