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James Lasdun at the Guardian has a wonderful piece on the short story as an art form and reviews some of the best collections of 2009:

"...it raises the question of whether there is any special quality, aside from length, that distinguishes the short story from other literary forms, and if so to what extent these particular writers avail themselves of it. I think there's at least a unique potentiality in the short story, and that it has to do with, among other things, omission and a quality of internal resonance between the parts that, if handled well, can escalate the emotional power of the whole"

He definitely gave me good reason to add five more books to my must-read books.

"...What makes the collection so good is partly the fineness of detail - emotional as well as social and sensory. Story after story plays with the same set of variables, but always in different, vividly imagined situations, and always with unpredictable outcomes." Buy from Amazon

Loosely connected around the family of an elderly landowner, KK... Continue reading

James Wood reviewing John Wray's Lowboy writes:

What is impressive about the book is its control, and its humane comprehension of radical otherness. In this regard, it ideally justifies itself, as one always hopes novels will. You can imagine replying to someone who was curious about what it’s like to be schizophrenic, “Well, start with John Wray’s novel.” Lowboy may often be lost to himself, but he is not lost to us. Wray knows how to induce and then manage a kind of epistemological schizophrenia in the reader, whereby we can inhabit Lowboy’s groundless visions and still glimpse the ground they negate.

Daniel Green reviewing Tom Mccarthy's "Remainder" writes

For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator.(...)

But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions (...)

Emre Peker reviews one of the classic books I have stashed in my To-be-read book pile -

The Master and Margarita shows the folly of Soviet repression, but it does not stop at mere cynicism and irony. Bulgakov also illustrates that the devil might watch out for Jesus, and vice versa, i.e., there are more gray areas even in the scripture than one might ordinarily perceive.

The gripping plot surely helps with the read, but Bulgakov's genius is in the subtle theories and observations he advances throughout this page-turner, forcing a reader to think about what it all means as a grin maliciously spreads across his face.

About seven years ago, when she was 38, Rosemary Mahoney rowed down the Nile, alone, in a small skiff. ''What I wanted, really, was not just to seethe Nile River,'' she writes, ''but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.'' Whether she was deranged, courageous, or a little of both is a question that hangs over Down the Nile, her riveting account of the experience, a portrait of the artist as an obsessive, sunburned young woman and of the complicated male-dominated society that she encountered in that part of the world.

Review at Entertainment Weekly

Kanjisheik, reviewing William Darlymple's The Last Mughal writes

Using all these disparate sources, Darlymple succeeds in creating a masterpiece that challenges the existing theories about the Revolt. Instead of the single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historians, Darlymple says that there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance that were determined by local and regional factors.

In another review, noted author Kushwant Singh writes

Dalrymple's book rouses deep emotions. It will bring tears to the eyes of every Dilliwala, among whom I count myself.

Readers interested in the book will also be interested in the piece "Rising, Falling" written by William Dalrymple offering a "a new look at one of Indian history's most enigmatic episodes, and its aftermath"

In just 279 pages we move from post-war Manhattan to Long Island in the 1970s, and from Mary and John's first coupling to the mistimed conception of their first grandchild.

But slowly, inexorably, we are drawn in by the power of the descriptive writing, and the gradual accumulation of insights. The almost-tragedy as Mary gives birth prematurely to her fourth child on the sitting-room sofa. The disorientation of the child whose mother suddenly is not at home, her presence unnervingly absent.

The horror of the teenage Annie as she watches her friend having an abortion, the white woven polyester of the nurse's cheap uniform etched on her mind.

Review by Kate Chisholm at Telegraph

Poppa Neutrino is a man teeming with ideas and ambitions, a fool to some and a marvel to others, a near-toothless chronic nomad and a transitory gambler, soldier, preacher, prophet, musician, husband, and father, among other things, and especially a raft-builder and sailor whose passions (...)

Alec Wilkinson makes sense of it all in "The Happiest Man in the World " despite writing about someone whose "lavish and prodigal [life] does not easily compress." Wilkinson succeeds in part by skillfully shifting among his roles as a detached narrator, an interpreting presence, and a participating character.

Review at The Boston Globe

Dave Itzkoff reviewing the new anthology of Philip K. Dick's work titled "Four Novels of the 1960s" at The New York Times writes

Most portraits of Dick (who died in 1982 at the age of 53) want to force him into one of several prefabricated categories: the all-purpose visionary who anticipated everything from the Internet to the Tiananmen Square massacre; the five-times-married hedonist(...)

"Four Novels of the 1960s" rescues the author from his biographical trappings (save for some pages of chronology at the back) and forces you to consider him solely on the basis of his prose. And on Page 1, it confronts you with the single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick’s career, “The Man in the High Castle.”

Charles Peterson, calling Peter Handke "one of the greatest German writers of the past 50 years" reviews his translated work "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos" over at The Village Voice.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, both brilliant and maddening by turns, makes an artistic apologia for Handke's reactionary politics. Call it the Don Quixote defense: the novel, set largely in the mountains above La Mancha, contrasts a poetic female banker—a stand-in for the Don as well as Handke—with an "objective," Sancho Panza–like reporter. The setup produces surprising comedy; Handke, as one critic puts it, has never been known for wit, and, "even by German standards, is remarkably humorless."