Anne Enright at the 2008 IFOA Toronto

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Joseph O’Neill’s novel “Netherland” (Pantheon) : "what is most remarkable about it: that it is a postcolonial re-writing of “The Great Gatsby.” "  Half way through and although full of fine phrases, can’t say I’m sold.

Marilynne Robinson’s “Home” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

José Saramago’s “Death with Interruptions” (Harcourt).

Anne Enright’s stories “Yesterday’s Weather” (Grove) Stay tuned for my interview with her. 

James Kelman’s best novel so far, “Kieron Smith, Boy,” (Harcourt) is, like all his work, challenging, late modernist, fairly unpunctuated, and written in run-on Glaswegian dialect, which must be why it has been received with indifference or hostility in America, and was ignored in Britain by this year’s middlebrow Booker Prize committee. Stuck in the 19th Century?

 William Flesch’s examination of fiction and evolutionary biology, in “Comeuppance: Costly Signalling, Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction” (Harvard),

Ted Cohen’s little philosophical essay on how metaphor gets us to think of others, was tremendous (“Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor”; Princeton).

Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul (“The World Is What It Is,” published by Knopf) has hundreds of qualities, not least its very Naipaul-like unshockability in the face of vile knowledge.

Orwell’s journalistic essays Facing Unpleasant Facts, (edited by George Packer) and literary essays “All Art Is Propaganda, (with an introduction by Keith Gessen).

Finally, the new paperback edition of Alex Ross’s “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) will bring this marvellous work to an even larger audience. Finally got my copy back from a friend.

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Related posts:

1. The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2007
2. Soon-to-be-published books I’m interested in Reviewing
3. The Best of the ‘Top Ten Books of 2008′ lists, and Author Interviews
4. Audio interview with Lydia Davis conducted by Nigel Beale: On Translation
5. NB’s Favourite Books, or The Essential Reading List, or What Your Ho should Know

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