Just this week, TIME’s Aryn Baker referred to the US’s current entanglement in Afghanistan as “the unwinnable war” (cover article, under the unnecessarily leading headline Why the US will never save Afghanistan). After finishing Stephen Tanner’s very readable military history of the same, I have to agree with her summary: two and a half thousand [...]
Published in 1999, An Unexpected Light is a remarkable piece of travel writing – it won the 2000 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award – and a very interesting memoir of two journeys through Afghanistan at different times in the country’s history. But more than anything it is a love story: a tribute to Jason Elliot’s [...]
Tokyo Vice first skulked across my radar last summer when Jake Adelstein spoke at the Frontline Club. I had tickets to the event but at the last minute, circumstances intervened and I missed out. It was a crying shame: this is the kind of memoir that, lively and engaging in book format, would verily crackle [...]
Mavis Gallant is the kind of woman I’d like to take to tea. Or better yet, kir royale and a sneaky Gitanes in a Parisienne sidewalk cafe, where I would sit and listen as she unfolded the lives of all those who walked by. This is an author with exceptionally acute powers of observation.
Going Ashore
Alberto Manguel [...]
I picked up Home in an airport bookstore and decided to purchase it based on the obscenely glowing (example: “it makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards” – Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph) reviews marched across the front cover, back cover, and first few pages (there may be a point in here about advertising [...]
Kilter is the subject of my fifth short fiction review this year. It’s a funny little book, certainly the shortest of short fiction I have ever encountered. The volume contains 55 fictions, as the book bills them, and none is longer than three pages.
Kilter
John GouldRavenstone 2003, Paperback, 205 pages, £9.55
This year I re-read three of Franzen’s books in preparation for his new one, Freedom. James’s scathing review has given me pause, but I expect I will cave and read what is being billed as ‘The Great American Novel’ at some point in 2011.
The Discomfort Zone
Jonathan FranzenHarper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 195 pages, £8.99
I read The Discomfort Zone in [...]
“Drugs. Guns. Money. Power.” — so promises the blood-spattered cover of this not-so-cautionary tale. Escobar certainly delivers: this is a dark and riveting adventure.
It’s the very definition of a one-way trip to Regretsville, where even the highest highs (more money than they knew what to do with… the entire extended family living in a luxurious [...]
Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers whose work I have long looked forward to diving into, but have held back for some reason or other. (In this case, because I want to read the body of work as a whole, preferably on some hazy sun-filled holiday.)
I read The Road last year and found it [...]
The Myth of Supply & Demand was lent to me by a friend, who knows, through another friend, its author, Michelle Keill. The book was pressed into my hands to the tune of, “I can’t wait to hear what you think”… but I’m willing to bet its author can go a lifetime without that little [...]
