1. List of the Lost by Morrissey Wins the Bad Sex Award 2015
The Sydney Morning Herald: Former lead singer of The Smiths, Morrissey, has beaten off stiff competition to win this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award with a cringe-worthy scene featuring his main character’s “bulbous salutation”.
The noted miserablist ultimately impressed judges at The Literary Review with the awfulness of the prose from his first novel List Of The Lost.
2. Jennifer Senior Reviews The Man With the Golden Typewriter by Fergus Fleming
The New York Times: Ian Fleming adored women, fast cars, golf, martinis and cards, and he cheerfully assigned these same hobbies to his most famous fictional creation, Agent 007. But “The Man With the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters” is much less about Fleming’s glamorous cavorting than it is about his brazen hustle to become a famous commercial novelist. This will come as a disappointment, perhaps, to anyone who dives into this collection and expects an orgy of vice.
Guernica: It’s raining when Hugh arrives at the gates of Jerusalem, and the skirmish is already well underway. Roman legionnaires are hacking at faceless creatures in dark blue skin suits. The skin suits are shooting back with laser cannons. The bone-thin, nailed-up figure moans and bleeds, the usual morbid backdrop to this muddy melee.
Hugh sighs. He affixes his pocket amplifier, tells the time pirates that if they don’t stop shooting and come quietly, they’ll all be neutralized. The Romans stop hacking and stare.
4. Michael Dirda Reviews Self and Soul by Mark Edmundson
The Washington Post: The only thing in Mark Edmundson’s new book that isn’t provocative is its title. “Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals” sounds earnest, high-minded and dull, probably a worthy academic study revisiting territory mapped out long ago by Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling.
Wrong. What you will find instead is an impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard.
5. An Interview with John Irving
Guernica: “I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, “You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence.” I never did that, and I wouldn’t do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I’m not being prescriptive. I’m not proselytizing.”
Book details
- List of the Lost by Morrissey
EAN: 978-0141982960
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- The Man With the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters edited by Fergus Fleming
EAN: 9781408865477
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- The Unfinished World: And Other Stories by Amber Sparks
EAN: 9781631490903
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- Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals by Mark Edmundson
EAN: 9780674088207
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- Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving
EAN: 9781451664171
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