At least two of the nominees on the Booker Prize longlist were not even reviewed let alone widely available when the roster was announced. Now Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty are getting pre-publication press attention. John Updike offers some mixed praise for the former in the New Yorker, chiding Rushdie […]

Publishers appear to assume that once autumn arrives, people cast aside their Dan Browns and J.K.Rowlings, and endeavour to tackle some serious literature. Ireland’s leading novelist, John McGahern has written “Memoir“, a non-fiction account due out in September of his childhood spent in the fairly grim milieu of the Irish border county, Leitrim, during the […]

OK, picking on John Irving and now Sebastian Faulks might get me accused of shooting fish in the proverbial. But I couldn’t let this go. There’s a profile of the popular novelist in the last Observer— the strapline caught my attention:”He’s the Balzac of Holland Park, a ‘must-read’ novelist who seems happiest writing about turn-of-the-century […]

Occasionally my friends mock me. There are plenty of reasons why they do so but one among many is that I sometimes make pronouncements on a book without having gone to the bother of actually reading the thing. It’s not that I haven’t done some research–I might have read the opinions of quite a few […]

Just when you thought they were gone, the novelists-from-the-eighties-who-the-critics-couldn’t-kill are back in force. First, we had Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, now the writer that Ellis fondly refers to as “The Jayster” is back, with “The Good Life.”Jay McInerney’s first novel in more than six years deals with ‘story of Luke, who is late for […]

Walter Kirn is one of those critics whose writing is usually better than the stuff he’s reviewing. He shares James Wood’s knack for the pithy putdown (Wood on John Updike: “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book.”) but not the latter’s propensity to […]

(Or four items I saw on the web today and decided to link to in lieu of writing something interesting.)1. A new �3,000-a-night luxury hotel, which will replace useless trees and stuff.2. An RTE drama whose contemporary “cred” resides in the fact that its characters don’t go to mass and “spend their weekends drinking and […]

Cindy Sheehan, mother of the US Army Specialist killed in Iraq last year and currently camped outside President Bush’s Crawford retreat demanding a face-to-face meeting. Yes, it’s Christopher “The Hitch” Hitchens in Slate dismissing the woman’s efforts to get “some more face-time with our chief executive.”Of course, Hitchens manages to season his hatchet job with […]

Private Eye magazine honours the venerable English tradition of being suspicious of anything that has a whiff of intellectualism by having a section known as “Pseuds Corner“–a ragbag of postmodern blurbs, art catalog bumf, and Sunday columnists’ posturing. You used to get a tenner sterling if they printed your suggestion. I think the following would […]

David McWilliams is one of the best columnists working in Irish journalism (admittedly the competition isn’t that intense). In today’s Sunday Business Post, he examines the reasons behind the potentially worrying rise in Germany of the Linkspartei, the ramshackle populist coalition led by the former head of the East German Communists Gregor Gysi and Chancellor […]