With the Booker longlist out, that means betting is underway. Bookies are calling David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy, and Andrea Levy the favorites right now, with Damon Galgut the longest shot to win the prize.
The 2010 Booker Longlist Odds
An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
The Great Goldfinch Debate
“No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?” Vanity Fair has big questions and lots of opinions about Donna Tartt‘s latest novel, which we’ve covered pretty extensively ourselves.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Adler; Smith; Harris; Margolin; Hall; Mailer; Saramago
Out this week: The Wall by H.G. Adler; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; Screenplay by MacDonald Harris; Woman with a Gun by Phillip Margolin; Essays after Eighty by Donald Hall; Selected Letters by Norman Mailer; and Skylight by the late Nobel laureate José Saramago. For more on these and other recent titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Close Reading with a Community
Follow Saturday: Poetry Brain, which is the “poetry and literature side of Rap Genius.” You may remember my last shout out for their work – it involved a certain finger being extended to the “stripped down simplicity of the Imagists.”
only sell to the rich or deranged
The folks at BookRide, the blog of London’s beloved antiquarian bookstore Any Amount Books, have published a handy set of guidelines for curmudgeonly booksellers. When Kyo Maclear visited The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto, it would seem that they had yet to stumble upon this code of curmudgeonly conduct.
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A Year in Reading from The New Yorker
New Yorker contributors – including a couple of participants in our “Year in Reading” series – offer a predictably thoughtful and heterodox guide to the best books they read this year.
“The Soul of the Censor”
Recommended reading: Robert Darnton writes for The New York Review of Books blog about the history and politics of censorship.
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