Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Wins The Best of the Booker

It’s all over the international press: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Wins The Best of the Booker.

In order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, six previous winners of the award were shortlisted by a panel of judges and submitted for public vote in order to be awarded the Best of the Booker title.

Read more

Who are scientists?

The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Places Of Interest

»BOOKFORUM

With five issues per year and sustained by daily posts that link to subjects covering visual art, political life, or literary subjects, book forum is certainly a place to visit with the morning coffee, at lunch break and later, in the afternoon, as a companion for the second coffee treat of the day.

Read more

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939

Uncommon Arrangements explores the dynamics of seven miserable ‘marriages à la mode’. From the hell that was life with H G Wells (’I am thinking continually’, wrote his wife, who shared him with a harem, ‘of the disappointing mess of it’) to the weirdness of being loved

Philip Roth’s Indignation (2008): First Extended Review

Indignation, a story of sexual survelliance in God-fearing America, revisits the same war and the same fear. Fear, in fact, underlies the actions of nearly every character.

I Love You (italics mine)

Prayers sold on eBay auctions; a musical set after the Yellow Pages; anti-depressant, aromatic high-tech textiles; Max Endorphin’s levitations; trouble in Disneyland; the revenge gone wrong of a rich family against the nanny that is on the verge of publishing embarrassing facts about her employers and more, are all found in the last book of Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy.

A collection of humorous 18 short-stories, Mere Anarchy, the first of its kind published by Woody Allen in the last 25 years was received with mixed reviews.

Read more

Returning To Earth

‘Jibanananda’ is a Tagorean name; its meaning, ‘the joy of life’, recalls, for me, the lines from a famous song in the Gitanjali, in which Tagore’s defiant Nietzschean mood is contained, as it almost always is, by decorum and serenity: ‘Jagate ananda jagne/ Amaar nimantrana’ —

The grandest family in publishing

Jeremy Lewis reviews The Seven Lives of John Murray by Humphrey Carpenter

Funny bones, Communist jokes

“How do you deal with mice in the Kremlin?” “Put up a sign saying ‘collective farm’. Then half the mice will starve and the others will run away.”

Szentkuthy Miklós profile | Mansarda review …

At hlo József J. Fekete profiles ‘the Proteus of Hungarian literature’, Szentkuthy Miklós (1908–1988), in Outprousting Proust

« Previous Page — Next Page »