By Maria Popova
What single Chinese men have to do with evolution and insults from Virginia Woolf.
We love, love, love words and language. And what better way to celebrate them than through the written word itself? Today, we turn to five of our favorite books on language, spanning the entire spectrum from serious science to serious entertainment value.
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By Ian Youngs
The latest thriller from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is expected to be the best-selling book of the year. But that has not stopped literary critics from gleefully tearing Inferno apart.
Brown discusses his “hurtful” reviews, taking inspiration from Dante and why he thinks readers should worry about the novel’s central theme of global overpopulation.
“Bilge”, “noxious malarkey” and “entertaining twaddle” are just some of the choice phrases that have been picked to describe Dan Brown’s Inferno in the press.
It is no surprise that Inferno has been met with such a reception. Since The Da Vinci Code was published a decade ago, Brown has been the author that the literati love to hate.
But nor is it a surprise that Inferno immediately shot to the top of best-seller lists, had the highest number of pre-orders since JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and is odds-on favourite to be 2013′s biggest-selling book.
Brown’s enthralling yarns, which intertwine plausible-sounding conspiracy theories with life-or-death treasure hunts and the resonating weight of art history, are incredibly popular. Before Inferno, Brown’s five novels had sold 190 million copies.
Of anywhere in the world, he says his books get the worst reviews in the UK, where it “seems to be sport to kick me around a bit”.
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By Richard Thomas
This list is entirely subjective, based on books that I’ve read over the years. But what they all have in common is that they’ve stayed with me. Many of these titles I’ve read over and over again. Some are touchstones, lodestones that I reference when I get blocked, bowing at the feet of masters that have taught me everything I’ve ever learned about what makes compelling fiction. I’m hoping that you’ve read most of these and will spend much of this column nodding your head in agreement. More importantly, I hope you find some new authors and novels that will enlighten you at some point down the road.
NOTE: The genres I’ve picked are “major” to me, not to publishing in general. In leaving out romance, for example. I’m not saying it’s unimportant, just not for me. As you know, I tend to be drawn to dark writing, so that’s probably easy to see in these selections, including the YA and literary fiction.
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By Chris Michaud
Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng has won the Walter Scott Prize, which honors historical fiction writers, for his post-World War Two novel, “The Garden of Evening Mists.”
Tan, who was born in Penang, Malaysia, and lives in South Africa, accepted the prize on Friday at the Brewin Dolphin Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland. It was presented by the Duke of Buccleuch, who established the award four years ago.
The duke is a distant descendant of the prize’s namesake, whose works include the 19th century historical novels “Waverly,” “Ivanhoe” and “Rob Roy.”
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A.M. Homes
By Victoria Brownworth
On June 6, American author A.M. Homes was awarded the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction at a ceremony in London for her novel May We Be Forgiven.
The prize, formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction, was established in 1996 and is awarded to a female author of any nationality who has written a novel in English that has been published in the U.K. in the previous year. The winner receives £30,000 ($46,000) and a bronze sculpture called the Bessie, created by artist Grizel Niven. The long list is announced in March, with the shortlist announced in June. The final choice follows within a week’s time. The judges are “five leading women.”
I had been vacillating over who I wanted to win. The five finalists were Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies, Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior, Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Zadie Smith, NW, Maria Semple, Where’s You Go, Bernadette and the winner, A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven.
Both Kingsolver and Smith had won in previous years. Mantel has won so many awards, The Women’s Prize may be the only one she doesn’t have and she was the heavy favorite to win for the second in her exciting and muscular historical trilogy. She previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies.
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 T. H. White On this day in 1938 T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone was published, the first volume in the eventual quartet known as The Once and Future King. Although mindful of the quest archetypes, White’s version of Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the King Arthur legends takes its own wandering, anachronistic and quirky path, often suggesting Monty Python more than Malory. |
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The Washington Post did not review Martin Amis’ latest novel favorably, but the book blurb suggests otherwiseBy Prachi Gupta
As book blurb whore/not whore Gary Shteyngart will tell you, writing book blurbs is an artform — but it’s also a bit of a farce.
As Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles points out, the book blurb from the Washington Post on the front of Martin Amis’ “Lionel Asbo” (which Charles did not review favorably) is so disingenuous, it borders on lying:
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James Salter: we are “born in disregard of the times”
For 50-odd years James Salter has been the writer’s writer. Richard Ford calls him “the Master”, Bellow was an admirer, Roth, too, and all over Brooklyn satchels bulge with copies of Light Years and The Hunters.
It was something, I suspect, that always worked better for us than it did for him. We got that insider buzz of knowing that we were part of the cloistered few. He got lots of writerly plaudits about the precision of his sentences, but was denied, perhaps, the deep thematic engagement that comes with central cultural import.
Either way, it’s over. In a late flurry he has picked up The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize, the PEN/Malamud lifetime award, and, now, to coincide with the publication of what will surely be his last novel, across-the-board adulation.
You might have thought it irritating for old Jim that all this has happened deep into his eighties, past the age when you would want to take full advantage of the perks of full-blown literary celebrity. But really it’s of little consequence – he’s already done enough living and then some. Improbably masculine and accomplished, he was a combat fighter pilot in the Korean War. He became an accomplished skier (he wrote the screenplay for Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer); a daring mountain climber (Solo Faces, a novel, appeared on the topic in 1979); and found time to write five novels, dozens of short stories, non-fiction and some poetry.
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Ann Patchett
| By Ann Patchett
Booksellers do not guard their best secrets: they are a generous tribe and were quick to welcome me into their fold and to give me advice. I was told to hang merchandise from the ceiling whenever possible, because people long to buy whatever requires a ladder to cut it down. The children’s section should always be in a back corner of the store, so that when parents inevitably wandered off and started reading, their offspring could be caught before they busted out of the store. I received advice about bookkeeping, bonuses, staff recommendations and websites.
While I was flying from city to city, Karen [Hayes] was driving around the South in a U-haul, buying up shelving at rock-bottom prices from various Borders stores that were liquidating. I had written one check before I left, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I kept asking if she needed more money. No, she didn’t need more money.
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Gerbrand Bakker
| By Charlotte Williams
Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won this year’s £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with his novel The Detour, published by Harvill Secker.
It is the author’s second major literary prize win; his previous novel, The Twin, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010.
Bakker will share the prize money with the title’s translator, David Colmer [pictured right].
The Detour follows Emilie, a translation professor and Emily Dickinson scholar, who retreats from her life in the Netherlands to an isolated farm house in Wales following an affair with a student.
Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the Independent and award judge, said: “Swift-moving and apparently straightforward, but with mysterious hidden depths, The Detour is a novel that grips its reader tight and never lets go
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