The Most Dysfunctional Families in Literature

By Jami Attenberg

Neuroses run rampant across three generations of the Middlestein family in Jami Attenberg’s sublime new novel, The Middlesteins. Who better to recommend great books about profoundly imperfect families?

In literature, as in life, every family is pretty much dysfunctional in one way or another. So what makes one dysfunctional literary family more memorable than the next? Personally, I prefer a little wit with my disaster, not to mention a little soul; it makes the pain go down easier. But every once in a while I like my families extra wicked and dark. I guess it makes me feel like I’m not that terrible after all.

By the way, these aren’t in order of my favorites, because it is impossible for me to pick a favorite! I love all these troubled souls — siblings and parents, husbands and wives alike — equally.

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96-year old L.A. blogger pops onto Amazon’s bestseller list

By Carolyn Kellogg

Los Angeles blogger Barbara “Cutie” Cooper has seen a lot in her 96 years: the Prohibition era, World War II, children, grandchildren, a 73-year marriage, the death of her husband Harry in 2010 at age 98, 18 presidents, and countless technological innovations.

But this week she’s seeing something new: her book climbing the Amazon.com bestseller list.

“Fall in Love for Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage” was published quietly by Chronicle Books on Jan. 1. Co-written with her granddaughters Kim and Chinta Cooper, “Fall in Love for Life” combines long-view wisdom and surprisingly sassy sex advice.

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What is the Great American Novel? (VOTE)

By Gabe Habash

It’s time to cast your lot: what is The Great American Novel? Cather or Fitzgerald? Lee or Bellow? Stephen King?

To help make this impossible question less impossible, we’ve decided to limit each great writer to one book apiece–that means if you’re looking for As I Lay Dying, you won’t find it, but you will find The Sound and the Fury. You only get one vote, so make it count.

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Granta’s class of 2013: picking the 20 best young British novelists

Howls of outrage are bound to accompany next month’s unveiling of Granta’s list of top 20 young writers. Here a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel reveals how the list takes shape.

By Alex Clark

Ten years is a long time in the literary game: it can easily take someone until then to finish writing a decent novel – although that’s less and less likely to wash with contemporary publishers. But a decade is also more than enough time for a writer’s fortunes to change dramatically.

Take Hilary Mantel. In 2003 she was a highly respected novelist and critic, the author of such enthusiastically reviewed novels as Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, The Giant, O’Brien and A Place of Greater Safety, the epic fictional portrayal of the French revolution published a decade previously that had probably been her most widely read novel. In the spring of 2003 her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, came out. But Beyond Black, her macabre novel of psychic shenanigans in the home counties, was still two years away; and we would have to wait several more before Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies would scoop two Man Booker prizes and transport Mantel to the highest echelons of writerly fame. Ten years ago she was the very emblem of the seriously talented and audacious female writer who was somehow rarely mentioned in the same breath as the holy trinity of Amis, Barnes and McEwan. Now, she cannot express a mildly contentious view in a literary journal without waking to find an outraged press pack camped on her front lawn.

Both scenarios are mad, and flipsides of the same issue. The pigheaded undervaluing of certain writers and the overnight obsession with others suggest problems with scale and perspective; problems that are perhaps related to Jonathan Franzen’s analysis of the trappings that come with mega-successful authorship.

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The novelty value of Publishers Weekly’s novel list

Philip Roth and John Grisham: both authors made the Publishers Weekly list of the 20th century’s annual bestsellers – but Roth just once, with Portnoy’s Complaint

This compilation of 100 years of No 1 bestsellers is oddly melancholy. Who knew literary immortality was so transient?

By Emma Brockes

The number of books and blogposts written around the premise of Doing an Arbitrary Thing Over the Course of a Year is long enough, now, that you could probably greenlight a meta-project to Do Everything Arbitrary You Can Do in a Year, in a Year. (AJ Jacobs is to blame for the Year of Living Biblically, followed by Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Gretchen Rubins’ The Happiness Project and all those books in which a lady with love troubles learns to do three things, the last of which is “and make spaghetti”.)

Anyway. The latest loose addition to the genre is 100 Years, 94 Books, a fun-sounding plan by Matt Zahn, a creative writing student at California State, to plough through the Top 100 books of the last 100 years, one a week, because why not?

The data comes from Publishers Weekly and lists the No 1-selling book of each year from 1913 – Winston Churchill’s The Inside of the Cup – to EL James in 2012.

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10 Books That Rewrite History

By Peter Dimock

Peter Dimock’s George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time defies simple description. It is a novel where history meets method, and where narrative approaches madness. It’s also a treasure trove of poetic prose that rewards careful attention. We asked Dimock, whose own novel challenges what we think we know as “history,” to pick 10 books that do the same. These are the books to read when you want to jolt yourself out of your shell.

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10 Classic Books You Read in High School You Should Reread

By Kevin Smokler

In Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School, Kevin Smokler takes you on a trip down high school memory lane, when you couldn’t stand reading As I Lay Dying or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Or maybe you could, you bookworm. Either way, Smokler gives us 10 books and 10 compelling reasons why you should revisit them.

It’s all too easy to look at the novels assigned to us as high school students as monuments or mist, to be worshiped or abandoned as we did our outfit to the junior prom. That either/or narrative matches both how we encounter these “great books” in education (as non-negotiable requirements) and an educator’s hope for our response (that their “greatness” changes our lives). That may be a whole lot no-shades-of-gray thinking on my part. As proof, I’ll accept a “meh” opinion on Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter from anyone assigned to write an essay on it as a teenager.

Is there a third way? I hope so. I spent the last year rereading the books my high school teachers assigned to me. My thinking: It isn’t enough to give a classic another look just because “it’s a classic.” A classic is also so because of its resonance and usefulness throughout time, JST as Shakespeare’s Henry V was a patriotic salvo when Laurence Oliver adopted it at the beginning of the Cold War and a warning about the cost of empire when Kenneth Brannagh did at the end of it.

Below are 10 high school classics where I found that useful thing I missed the first time around.

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Are these the 50 most influential books by women?

By Robert McCrum

As readers pointed out, my last list was rather skewed to a male-dominated tradition. Here is an alternative perspective

Last week’s post about the 50 turning-points of English (and American) literature stirred up quite a bit of debate, raising some interesting issues. One of the big complaints about my selection was the inadequate representation of women writers. This blog has been admittedly slow to engage with the gender politics of literature, but this challenge – what about the women ? – is self-evidently a fair question.

My previous list (and it was only a list) reflected patriarchal values, and a male-dominated literary culture. That’s hard to avoid, in the light of history. But, as Kathleen Taylor and Gillian Wright have shown, there is another story, a different way of looking at our cultural bibliography.

And so, 50 years to the day since the death of Sylvia Plath, here is my alternative Anglo-American list of the 50 women writers who shaped our literary landscape – a list constructed with no conferring on my part with any other pre-existing catalogue.

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Books that illuminated gay life for Americans

The Boy Scout Handbook offers good advice about how to read

By Ron Charles

The Boy Scouts of America announced today that it would delay any decision about its policy on gay members until May. That gives the leadership three months to catch up on some good books.

As you might expect, “The Boy Scouts Handbook” offers practical advice on many things, even how to read: “The book should be held on a level with the face and not too close. Sit erect. Reading when lying down or from the light of the fireplace is unwise.”

But “The Handbook” is less helpful on what to read. As they deliberate the knotty question of whether to welcome gay members, the Boy Scout executives might consider selecting — wisely and on the level — from these titles that have helped many Americans open their hearts and minds:

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The 7 Weirdest Sex Stories of the Ancient World

By Vicki Leon

“Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had erotic preferences and sexual taboos we’ve seldom heard about,” says California author and historical detective Vicki León in her new book The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, & Longing in the Ancient World. Her book’s topics range from orgasm to the long-ago fear of hermaphrodites, from circumcision to the wide acceptance of a variety of gay relationships. With Tip Sheet, she shared some carnal curiosities and extraordinary stories of sex and love, encountered while researching The Joy of Sexus.

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