The Glass Pearks / Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

 

Emeric Pressburger’s Lost Nazi Novel

By Lucy Scholes

 October 18, 2019

RE-COVERED

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

All Time 100 Nonfiction Books / No 004 / A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers XLISTO

 

All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books

 No 004

Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

By Erin SkardaAug. 17, 2011

It may seem arrogant to refer to one’s first published book as a Work of Staggering Genius, but in Dave Eggers’s case, the truth is in the pages. The Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir, published in 2000, is easy to get lost in with its conversational narrative that’s at once paranoid and adept, casual yet sincere. And while it is heartbreaking to witness the deterioration of an otherwise unremarkable suburban family, as both Eggers’ parents succumb to cancer within a span of 32 days, the book is also undeniably uplifting and succeeds as an honest (if partly fictionalized) portrayal of the strength of family in the face of adversity. Eggers excels at conveying the weight of the burden laid upon him when, at age 21, he accepts the role of parent to his 8-year-old brother Toph. Though his “new model” parenting methods might not be considered normal by society’s standards, Eggers doesn’t hide from the fact that nothing about his and his brother’s situation is “normal.” Instead, he demands that the universe repay him and Toph for the heartache they’ve endured. Eleven years, six books, a successful publishing imprint and numerous nonprofits later, it seems that Eggers has been repaid in full.

TIME

Review

The best fiction of 2024

This article is more than 1 month old

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

Justine Jordan

Saturday 7 December 2024

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc / No way out

 

No way out

JoAnn Wypijewski is disturbed by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's outsider's chronicle of life in the New York ghetto, Random Family

JoAnn Wypijewski
Saturday 13 December 2003

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 
408pp, Flamingo, £17.

Someone once said, apropos nonfiction, that every writer betrays her subject. Intentions have nothing to do with it. Even fuelled by the best of them, "the story" is no longer the subject's but a processed thing, the real-life character's mixed-up narrative of history, memory, self-deception or protection made a coherent commodity, tradeable, by the writer, for cash, prestige, prizes. Any professional who has ever written about poor people especially has had to face this. I imagine Adrian Nicole LeBlanc must have done so more than once over the 11 years she spent assiduously recording the big events, daily goings-on, small-time joys and agonies of the "random family" of which, by her own account, she became a part in the course of her research. Then she wrote herself out of the story, becoming in the process its most provocative character: the voyeur who is everywhere and nowhere, watching and telling as things fall apart.

Dracula by Bram Stoker / A masterpiece

DRACULA BY BRAM STOKER

“Dracula” by Bram Stoker is a Gothic novel that tells the terrifying story of Count Dracula, a vampire who travels from Transylvania to England, unleashing a wave of horror and mystery. Through diaries and letters, the novel follows a group of characters led by Professor Van Helsing, who desperately struggles to stop Dracula and his evil influence. This classic work of horror explores themes of superstition, science, and the nature of evil, leaving an enduring mark on popular culture and the horror genre.

 

A bookstore in Spain.ÁLVARO GARCÍA

Why best-selling books are getting shorter

A study based on lists published by ‘The New York Times’ indicates that the average length has fallen 51.5 pages, which represents a decline of 11.8%

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in October

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in October

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month

Ian Rankin, John Self, and Guardian readers

Thu 31 Oct 2024 17.59 

 

August Beach Reads

Don’t let your iPhones overheat in the sun. Read a book instead. 

BY

MARCO ROTH,

DAVID MIKICS,

AND

PARK MACDOUGALD

AUGUST 14, 2023

MARCO ROTH

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

How does Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel—part satire, part fable—about an all-American goy losing and finding himself in a mostly magical Africa hold up? Bellow’s tribal princes, queens, and advisers would not be out of place in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Wakanda, nor, for that matter, at Leo Strauss’ University of Chicago seminars on Machiavelli and humanism. Crucially, for Bellow, the path to full humanity leads through a series of vivid, unsparing encounters with various animals: cows, frogs, lions, pigs. Henderson’s rambling story of an old carnival bear and a roller coaster—possibly the truest details in the novel apart from Bellow’s descriptions of flying over Egypt—crowns the book with a devastating coda.

Books that made me / Lisa Taddeo / ‘I suppose it comes as no surprise that I like dark writing’

 

Lisa Taddeo

Books

that 

made me

Lisa Taddeo: ‘I suppose it comes as no surprise that I like dark writing’

This article is more than 3 years old

The novelist on the influence of Joy Williams, giving up on Norman Mailer and finding comfort in William Trevor’s short stories

Lisa Taddeo

Friday 16 July 2021

The book that changed my life
The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg is a better book to read for expectant mothers than What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff. It flays open the notion of motherhood, personhood. Ginzburg’s husband was arrested for editing an anti-fascist magazine in Rome, and died after intense torture in jail. There’s a moment where she describes the way a child will eat fruit after grief that I think of weekly.

The book I wish I’d written
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin accurately captures that great gnawing fear that comes with motherhood. I read this book the morning after my birthday. My child was two and I had my first proper hangover since having a child. I read it and felt as if my heart was being cleaved from my body. I felt the truest fear of motherhood – that we are only one terrifying moment away from losing our children.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege. Williams has looked over the edge and seen what wild darkness there is to see, and she has come back to write it down for us. I suppose it comes as no surprise that I like dark writing, like Williams’, which seems to start in the grave and tunnel

The book I think is most underrated
Anything by Grace Paley. She is a gift of a voice and and someone I wish children would read in school.

The book that changed my mind

Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker didn’t so much change me as it opened my brain in a way that I thought only drugs could.

The last book that made me laugh

Luster by Raven Leilani. This line: “A waitress wearing a ten-gallon hat tosses a couple of sticky menus on the table. She tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves.” No one working today writes a cornucopia sentence like Leilani.

The last book that made me cry

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante. A mother leaves her two young daughters for two years. Then she comes back for them. But that isn’t even the plot. That is a few lines we get halfway through. Ferrante is so smart she knows the real story is told in a few sharp blows. The rest can be air around it, and will tell us everything we need to know.

The book I couldn’t finish

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Middlemarch.

The book I give as a gift

I would give A Grace Paley Reader to a high-school graduate or a grandmother with equal confidence that they would each love it.

My earliest reading memory

I don’t remember if it was The Secret Garden or Lois Duncan – God, she was great! – but pretty soon after, I was into Stephen King and VC Andrews and John Saul, and just wild and dark from the start.

My comfort read

William Trevor’s stories, like Alice Munro’s, are real: they are about life and violins and they have beginnings and middles and ends and make you cry and smile and suffer. I bring Trevor with me everywhere.

 Animal by Lisa Taddeo is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99).

THE GUARDIAN