A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Margaret Drabble
15 Apr 2013 03:29:44
The earliest story, "Hassan's Tower", features a honeymooning couple who are spending their first few days of wedded life in Morocco. But while their unvoiced worries about money and class (there's a deliciously awkward scene in which neither one of them will ask the price of some canapés) undercut the enforced romance of the experience at first, by the end the characters find their eyes opened to the interconnectedness of people.
In the title story, published in 1973, a woman who prides hersel... Read Full Story
The Last Man in Russia Oliver Bullough
15 Apr 2013 03:28:49
If Russia is dying, Bullough suggests one doesn't have to look far to find the cause. Russians are literally drinking themselves to death. If Bullough is right, then the staggering figure of Boris Yeltsin is a more accurate symbol for the nation that Putin's gung-ho, karate black-belt.
The statistics are sobering: Russia's population has been falling for decades, the average life expectancy of a Russian man having now dropped to below the age of retirement. Russian economists know what Lenin di... Read Full Story
O My America! Sara Wheeler
11 Apr 2013 01:40:57
On beginning the book Wheeler herself knew "a little about the conflicting demands of motherhood, economics and sanity". More precisely, she knew how it felt "not being taken seriously, not earning enough money, not building enough Lego" – and she was approaching 50, "a tough age". As she says, "role-models are rare for women contemplating a second act" and yet she has found six of them – the most famous being Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony.
Though Wheeler's emphasis is on her heroines' jour... Read Full Story
Real Pink floyd writtrn by Mark Blake
11 Apr 2013 01:18:31
Well, neither had I, to be honest, with odd exceptions. When John Lydon, Rotten as was, wore a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I hate" written by him above the band's name, that was the law as far as I was concerned. And it seemed to me that both their Syd Barrett and post-Syd music was pretty much wholly anticipated by the Beatles' "The Fool on the Hill" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", respectively. And yet that Geldof quote comes on page 382 of this book, and I had read the preceding 381... Read Full Story
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
10 Apr 2013 00:43:28
Shah Jahan built the minareted tomb for his third wife when she died after delivering their 14th child; Barnes, who is uxorious – as he points out – in the strict sense of the word, is writing here to commemorate his one irreplaceable wife, Pat Kavanagh, who was in a sense the "onlie begetter" of his 20 books and who remains the dedicatee of whatever he writes, even though she died in 2008. Barnes once adopted her surname as a pseudonym. Now in Levels of Life she is honoured as a co-creator, wit... Read Full Story
Under Your Skin by Sabine Durrant
09 Apr 2013 02:30:40
"They say," states the cover line on Under Your Skin, "the innocent have nothing to fear", but why, ask the police, didn't Gaby tell them that she touched the body? Isn't it strange, they say, how similar the dead woman, Ania, looks to Gaby? Why did Ania have a collection of cuttings about Gaby in her flat? Why does the evidence point towards a link between the two women, and why does Gaby keep denying it? All of a sudden, Gaby finds herself arrested, spending the night in a prison cell, vehemen... Read Full Story
The City of Devi by Manil Suri
09 Apr 2013 02:18:59
India has been invaded by China, its troops pouring through the northeastern frontier, and then by Pakistan. The UN forced the withdrawal of China (acting in concert with Pakistan all along), but Pakistan stayed put. Then cyber-attacks disabled many institutions, including computer networks, so that mobile phones and the internet packed up. In these circumstances, with nuclear warfare looming, no reaction can be described as normal, but fixation on the powers of fruit is a hard one to share.
Th... Read Full Story
I Remember by Joe Brainard
09 Apr 2013 02:16:03
In the early 1970s, New York poet and artist Joe Brainard wrote a letter to a friend. "I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me." At once intensely personal and strikingly universal, Brainard's I Remember has remained a cult clas... Read Full Story
Creation Adam Rutherford
07 Apr 2013 19:21:22
This book follows a distinguished tradition of works by scientists and journalists from the journal Nature (notably Philip Ball and Oliver Morton), who have written some of the most eloquent and genuinely thoughtful books on science over the past decade. Rutherford belongs in that category: his book displays all the storytelling savvy one would expect from a professional communicator, and while TV and radio documentaries, newspaper articles and blogs are very different in tone from a book, this ... Read Full Story
Hanging Man by Barnaby Martin
07 Apr 2013 19:19:32
Ai Weiwei's arrest in early 2011 made headlines around the world. His spectacular shows abroad, including the monumental Sunflower Seeds exhibition at Tate Modern in 2010, had confirmed him as an internationally celebrated artist, but his political activities at home, in particular his investigation of the collapse of schools in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, had got him into trouble. Like Al Capone, he was charged with tax evasion, but the real issue lay elsewhere.
Barnaby Martin has written a b... Read Full Story
Mod: A Very British Style by Richard Weight
07 Apr 2013 19:14:23
Ska was, triumphantly, a Commonwealth music that took hold in Britain's inner cities where Caribbean migration was most dense. My Boy Lollipop, sung by Millie Small with a pert underage suggestiveness, was one of the earliest pop-ska hits. It swept Britain in 1964, and became the year's bestselling single ahead of the Beatles and the Stones. For a while this sort of music brought urban whites and blacks together. By the early 1970s, however, with football "hooliganism" a fact of British life, mo... Read Full Story
The Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkinson
02 Apr 2013 12:43:56
One corpse was wearing a jacket with a monogram that revealed its owner's identity: SA Andrée, the Swedish explorer who, with two companions, had set off 33 years earlier, on 11 July 1897, in a hydrogen balloon to discover the north pole. The men's diaries showed they had fallen well short of their goal and had perished in October that year, trying to make their way back to civilisation.
The bodies of Andrée and his companions, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, were eventually brought back to... Read Full Story
