In the September issue of Harper’s magazine there’s an excellent article on the recent Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk, written by Christopher de Bellaigue (also check out the photo essay of Turkey on the pages preceding it). Alas, it’s not available online or I would link. The article, “There is no East” is less about […]
O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional memoir about how he would have killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman, has found a home: Beaufort Books, a vanity publisher (although in this case, it’s not exactly vanity – more like debasement). If the book actually sells, Judith Regan will strut and feel justified. But […]
The Boston Globe checks out Jean Thompson’s new collection of short stories, Throw Like a Girl, a title that should not be mistaken for any flavor of chick-lit. Thompson excels at portraying characters too easily betrayed by those they hoped to love and be loved by, too unobservant or naive to notice the thunderbolts poised […]
This news is actually a week old, and for many, might not even have become news. Dutton’s Brentwood is a bookstore on San Vincente Boulevard in Los Angeles, and has become something of a landmark. The first time I met Janet Fitch was at Dutton’s, at what I think I recall was her first reading, […]
Hello. I’m Will Entrekin. Pleased to see ya, as it were. My esteemed colleague and hopefully classmate-soon-to-be, the illustrious Mister Fox, asked me a little bit ago if I would contribute to his blog while he is in warmer climes. Though, technically, John and I are both in and around Los Angeles at this point, […]
The latest development in the furor over Salman Rushdie’s knighting is that the Pakistani clerics awarded Osama Bin Laden a title as well: A group of hardline Pakistani Muslim clerics said on Thursday they had bestowed a religious title on Osama bin Laden in response to a British knighthood for author Salman Rushdie. The Pakistan […]
From the San Francisco Gate comes a brief article offering a quote from Pakistan’s religious affairs minister: “If someone exploded a bomb on [Salman Rushdie’s] body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.” The International Herald Tribune reports that the protests and burning of effigies […]
Issue Eight of The Quarterly Conversation has now been released! It includes my review of Haruki Murakami’s latest, After Dark, a review written in real-time (since the book is almost in real time). Some of the other highlights are a review of Daniel Alarcon’s novel Lost City Radio – an incredible book from an incredible […]
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s latest novel, received mostly favorable reviews after its release in Britain earlier this year, but today Michiko Kakutani lays out a nasty opener in the NY Times Review: “After two big, ambitious novels — “Atonement” and “Saturday” — Ian McEwan has inexplicably produced a small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses […]
So I don’t normally post on BookFox about non-fiction titles, but I’m making an exception for William Langewiesche’s new book The Atomic Bazaar, which addresses the proliferation of nuclear weapons (if the title didn’t tip you off). I’ve been reading Langewiesche in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly for a while now, and his articles […]
