Since 2005, Scottish publisher Canongate has been building The Myths, a series of books matching well-regarded authors from all over the globe—Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Salley Vickers,
In Brigham Young creative writing professorPatrick Madden’s new collection of essays Quotidiana (U of Nebraska Press), we are immediately disabused of equating the ordinary and commonplace with the trivial by the two epigrams that welcome the reader to this bounteous volume of erudition and rumination. Montaigne observes, “From the
When it was first published, who would have expected (least of all Rupert Murdoch, who owns the publishing house) that A People’s History of the United States of America: 1492-Present (Harper Collins) would sell over a million copies. When I spoke with Howard Zinn in 2003, during one
Now that the dreary and dismal Bolshevik autocracy has been replaced by a colorful and freewheeling capitalist oligarchy, the artifacts and residue of the Soviet years are likely to be viewed more as a de-clawed feline or venom-less viper than echoes of plague years—or, in capitalism’s
The recent proliferation of Swedish crime writers should not overshadow the cadre of Irish lads who spin these tales as easily as they draw breaths. I’m talking about John Connelly, Benjamin Black (aka John Banville), and of course, the prolific Ken Bruen. And since London Boulevard (Minotaur) is being
In case anyone is wondering (as they should) how it is that baseball came to be a significant element in a number of Caribbean national cultures—Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, etc.—University of San Francisco mentor Robert Elias (Baseball and the American Dream, The Deadly Tools
British novelist Robert Harris’s (Imperium) second installment in his trilogy of the late Roman Republic, Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome (Simon & Schuster), begins when Cicero becomes Consul of Rome, a position which he achieved at the end of the first installment of this fictional history. As he
You are probably not as confused about the literary legacy of the great Ralph Ellison as I was—when it was published 10 years ago,I thought Juneteenth was the unfinished novel that Ellison had been struggling with for the 40 years between the publication of his magnum opus (Invisible
Will Self (The Butt), the author of six novels, four story collections, three books of novellas, and five works of nonfiction, is also well known for immoderate behavior fueled by overindulgence in various controlled and uncontrolled substances. Thus his second partnering with Ralph Steadman, the inimitable illustrator and Hunter Thompson
Robert Stone, who some commentators credit with being “one of our greatest living authors”—an assertion with which I would not argue—has a new (his second) story collection, Fun with Problems (Houghton Mifflin). If you know any of Stone’s work (Dog Soldiers, Prime Green), the word “fun” will
