White’s Books first appeared a couple of years ago, when they launched a series of attractive hardcover classics with decorated cloth. It’s a project run under the art direction of David Pearson, an ex-Penguin designer who worked on projects like the Great Ideas series, and the cheap green Popular Classics.

The latest from White’s is a new series of Pocket Classics. (more…)

A few months ago, I asked Twitter users to recommend their favourite literary magazines. The response was pretty impressive, and not least from the magazines themselves, many of whom are active on Twitter. I wound up with a list of a good dozen publications to explore, and first among these was Dublin-based The Stinging Fly, a triannual publication of new writing: poems, fiction, essays, reviews.

As well as the magazine, there’s The Stinging Fly Press, which publishes novels and anthologies. Among other titles, they’ve published Kevin Barry’s There are Little Kingdoms, and Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of stories by fourth year students from Larkin Community College.

Their latest publication is Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories edited by Philip Ó Ceallaigh. (more…)

People seem to be waking up to the fact that too much time spent browsing the web can damage our ability to concentrate on a single subject for extended periods.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, has been raising questions about the way Internet use (at work as well as at home) may be rewiring our brains, while over in the Guardian, Charlie Brooker wrote a piece entitled Google Instant is Trying to Kill Me, in which he discussed the ways that evolving technology has been chipping away at his attention span. He also tries something called The Pomodoro Technique, a special system whereby, through the use of a kitchen timer, we can train our minds to concentrate on a single subject for up to 25 minutes at a time!

What better time, then, to pick up the latest title from Peirene Press, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman. Oh, it’s short, like all Peirene’s books. It’s just 125 pages, which should present no challenge to even the most hyperlink-addled brain. Just 125 pages. Just a single, 125 page sentence. (more…)

Each year I try to do a rundown of the Booker longlist according to the book blogs. (Here’s 2008 & 2009.) I’m running a little late this year – don’t look at me like that, I’ve been busy – so let’s get straight to the Booker shortlist, 2010:

Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s first Booker winner, Oscar and Lucinda casts a shadow over several of the reviews of his new book. Jackie at Vulpes Libris can’t help noticing that one of the characters shares Oscar’s dishevelled red hair, while Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes finds himself revisiting Carey for the first time since reading that book (having skipped Carey’s other Booker winner, The True History of the Kelly Gang).

Kevin from Canada read this one with some reluctance, not being a huge Carey fan, or being familiar with Alexis de Toquevillle, whose journey to the USA inspired the book:

Carey is a competent and talented writer and he carefully and deliberately unfolds that story in a reader-friendly fashion. He has obviously researched his material thoroughly — too thoroughly for this reader, because long sections of the book are taken up with explanations of the obvious that left me wanting only for them to end. While I appreciate the author’s determination to chronicle the “American” story, he does not have much new to add — his respect for the obvious history is so great that it comes to dominate the book

See Kevin’s full review, and the subsequent discussion in the comments, here.

Room Emma Donoghue

John Self kicked off his review on The Asylum by measuring it against his initial hopes…

Room has an intriguing premise: it’s narrated by a five-year-old boy who lives in a room twelve feet square and doesn’t know the outside world exists. This immediately set my reading glands salivating: I imagined an allegorical, philosophical novel, a European-style confection that provided an analysis of all our lives by an extrapolation to the extreme, something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. So my disappointment with Room is partly unreasonable, denouncing it for not being a different book entirely.

… before coming to the conclusion that ‘it’s clear that Room aims at the heart rather than the head, and for many people the emotional heft of the story will be enough to recommend it.’

If Room didn’t find its natural reader in John, it fared better with Jackie at Farm Lane Books, (more…)

You probably think that we survived the Millennium Bug. Perhaps you’ve even stopped nervously looking at the VCR’s clock when it starts blinking 00:00, you no longer think twice before booking flights over New Year’s Eve, or wonder whether there really are computer chips inside milk cartons.

Well, maybe you’re right. But step into the world of Things We Didn’t See Coming, the debut novel by Steven Amsterdam, and you’ll wish we’d all stuck with the abacus.

The nine or so chapters (which fill just under 200 pages), follow a single, unnamed narrator over roughly thirty post-apocalyptic years, taking him from childhood, just before the catastrophe, to an accelerated old age. (more…)

Last year, my review of Charles Lambert‘s debut novel Little Monsters included a hypothetical conversation with the author over a plate of pasta. A few months later, we had exactly that. The conversation resulted in a lengthy and (I hope) very interesting interview, in which we discussed the strange political situation in Rome, and Lambert also went into great detail about his new novel, Any Human Face.

In a sense, then, I’ve scuppered myself, because it’s difficult for me to write a review that would be half as interesting as Lambert was that day. So if you’re interested in finding out more about the background to Any Human Face, I’d suggest that you start with the Charles Lambert interview. (more…)

Telegram, the literary fiction imprint from Middle-East non-fiction specialists Saqi books, is an imprint that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. Their list looks interesting, and their titles—All My Friends are Superheroes, Metropole, etc—seem to get quite a bit of attention.

I first heard of them last year on Twitter (where I am @thefictiondesk, and they are @Saqibooks), at a time when they were justifiably pleased with themselves for having won the 2009 Diversity in Literature Award, and by the beginning of 2010, I even managed to have one of their catalogues in hand—I got all the way to page 3 before finding something I wanted to read. (more…)

I’ve written about Bitter Lemon Press before, when I reviewed Saskia Noort’s Back to the Coast. They’re a solid niche press, publishing crime fiction, most of it translated, in paperback editions.

Involuntary Witness, which they’ve just republished with a new cover (see left) is the debut novel from one of their lead authors, the Italian one-time anti-mafia prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio.

The protagonist, in this novel and its sequels, is Guido Guerrieri, a defence lawyer who lives and works in Bari, a coastal town in the Italian region of Puglia (the area usually referred to as “the heel of the boot”). At the beginning of the novel, we find Guido in a bad state: still reeling from the end of his marriage, which has left him unable to concentrate at work and suffering from claustrophobia. When you add the development of a flirtation between Guido and his upstairs neighbour Margherita; and his latest case, involving an African streetseller accused of child murder, you get a pretty good idea of the formula that Carofiglio is working with. (more…)

I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to bother with doorstep novels, and when Roberto Bolaño’s much-lauded 2666 was published in English a year or so ago – all nine hundred pages of it – I decided that I didn’t have the time or the will to read it. Still, I was curious to see what kind of a writer lay behind the hype of 2666, and the recent UK publication of Nazi Literature in the Americas, one of Bolaño’s earlier, shorter works, has given me the chance. (more…)

I’ve always had a problem with over-the-top book design. From “interesting” binding styles to “witty” notes on the copyright page, whenever I see postmodern trickery on a book, I begin to worry that it’s trying to make up for a lack of anything more substantial. A generation of media studies students have demonstrated that postmodernism is art for the untalented, creativity for the uncreative.

I’ll probably never love McSweeney’s.

However, there are times – rare though they may be – when an eccentricity of design is simply the extension of a genuine creative process, rather than a substitute for it. If I was talking about architecture or technology, I’d say something about the form following the function and then we could all talk about Apple (or we could have, until they introduced those eye-burning glossy screens). This is a website about books, though, so I must be talking about A. C. Tillyer’s An A-Z of Possible Worlds, the latest publication from the relatively new Roast Books. (more…)

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