I haven’t read more than three chapters of Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi, but I’m moved to blog about it straight away for a couple of good reasons. First off, I just love the title, and the premise of the book. The novel starts with a fifteen year old boy rooting around in his family’s […]
It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas‘s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped – almost Bloom like – by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte […]
Tags: american authors
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Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is […]
Tags: american authors, narrative voices
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There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice. Three things stopped me, though – the peculiarly grumpy looking duck […]
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For many readers, particularly outside the United States, John Wray’s name will be a new one, despite the fact that this 37 year old Brooklyn-based writer has already published two critically acclaimed novels, The Right Hand of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue, has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, and in 2007 was chosen by Granta for […]
Tags: american authors, chuck palahniuk, writers and politics
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Sometimes I wish that, when buying a book in a book store, you were automatically given a complimentary title – that is to say, a book that will help you read the one you’ve just bought, as opposed to the ‘like this? you’ll love that’ recommendation. For example, with Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, […]
Tags: 9/11 and literature, american authors
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The first story in John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, is set in Lisbon. The narrator, John, by chance meets his mother while walking the streets of the city. There are two peculiar things about this meeting – the first is that his mother has been dead for fifteen years, and the second is that […]
Tags: american authors
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‘You couldn’t make it up’, screams the tabloid tv presenter as he recounts the surreal situation of Santa Claus and his helper elves being threatened by angry families in a run-down amusement park in the cultural wilderness of Kent. Far more entertaining, though starting from a similar run-down amusement park premise, is George Saunders brilliant […]
Tags: american authors, short stories
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Is Chuck Palahniuk one of America’s most underrated or overrated novelists? The answer to the question probably revolves around your attitude towards the shocking, because he is without doubt a novelist with the power to churn the stomach (although the reported faintings at readings of his short story ‘Guts’ seems exaggerated to me). Speaking to […]
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Back in the ‘90s, I read Tobias Wolff’s memoirs of growing up in a struggling, single-parent family – This Boy’s Life (1989) – and of serving as a junior officer in the U.S. airborne division in Vietnam – In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). I was impressed by both books, for the honesty […]
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