Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 36
August 4, 2009
"HE'S A SORT OF PLANET"
EDP24 takes a long look at Ian McEwan's forthcoming climate change novel.
"So I devised a character into whom I poured many, many faults. He's devious, he lies, he's predatory in relation to women; he steadily gets fatter through the novel. He's a sort of planet, I guess. He makes endless reforming decisions about himself: Rio, Kyoto-type assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere."
We'll keep an open mind, of course, and we do admire McEwan (Saturday notwithstanding), but we're always worried
July 31, 2009
NOTA BENE: AN UNDERACHIEVER'S DIARY
"What's it like to be a twin? I shared wombtime with someone else, which might explain my love of open spaces, and my tendency to live in cramped ones (more on this trend later). Unlike many other people Ihave no problem spending hour on end - even days in succession - by myself. Sometimes I think I can remember what it was like to be in utero, locked inside my mother's swampy trunk, nothing to do but listen to the outside world, grow, and wait for birth, my brother there beside me like a sha
July 30, 2009
HMM ...
Over at Chapter & Verse Blog, Richard Horan writes about his decision to stop reviewing novels.
As a novelist I was being asked to review other novels. Asking a novelist to review other novels is like asking an Italian chef to critique another Italian chef's spaghetti sauce.
Now, maybe we're sleep-deprived and cranky but this seems to us ... unsound reasoning, at best. The counter argument would be who better understands what does and doesn't make a novel work - and, perhaps more importantly, w
July 29, 2009
SIMON KARLINSKY DIES
Simon Karlinsky, who wrote authoritative volumes on Gogol, Nabokov and Chekhov, has died at 84.
Karlinsky, who taught at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1991, was the author, editor or translator of eight books, including "Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary" (1974), which Times critic Robert Kirsch said "may be the best single study of Chekhov ever done."
July 28, 2009
THE MAN BOOKER LONGLIST ...
... has been announced.
The Children's Book, AS Byatt (Chatto and Windus)
Summertime, JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)
How to paint a dead man, Sarah Hall (Faber)
The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin - Ireland)
Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Vik
July 27, 2009
MONDAY MARGINALIA
* Variety reports that David Cronenberg is planning on bringing Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis to the screen. (Thanks, EG.)
Cronenberg will helm and also adapt the 2003 novel for the screen. Story follows a 28-year-old multimillionaire on a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan. Considered one of America's leading novelists, DeLillo's most acclaimed works include "White Noise" and "Underworld."
* Nicholson Baker's New Yorker essay on the Kindle is more or less exactly what you'd expect. (Though we would p
July 24, 2009
GUEST ESSAY & GIVEAWAY: AMERICAN LION
And now for something completely different.
It's been a hellish week around here - migraines, heat waves, unpacking, bad internet. But we're finally through the storm and will resume our full load of usual literary blogging next week. Until then, just to show you we're not always literary fiction around here, we are pleased to offer an exclusive guest essay by Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, whose Andrew Jackson biography American Lion won the Pulitzer Prize. (We really do enjoy a good bi
July 21, 2009
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
The move is complete but we managed to get rather ill and our internet access is still not stable (this post has taken unreasonably long to get online), so it might be a day or two before updates resume and contest winners are announced. In the interim, avail yourself of our blogroll.
July 17, 2009
TEV GIVEAWAY: NETHERLAND
You've read the interview, you've heard all the praise, now read the book for yourself. Thanks to our friends at Vintage, we are happy to offer FIVE lucky TEV readers signed copies of the paperback edition of Netherland.
The rules are as they have ever been. Drop us an email, subject line "OH ME, OH MY, O'NEILL" and be certain to include your full mailing address. We will take all entries until Sunday, July 19 at 8 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will bestow its largesse o
