First things first: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, touted as his first novel in 10 years, is anything but.
Zadie Smith's On Beauty clearly owes much to E.M. Forster's novel, Howard's End. The similarities are obvious from the opening line -- a veritable mime of Forster's opening, despite the replacement of "letters" with the more contemporary "e-mails." One wonders whether originality is being strangled amid all this straight-laced literary homage, but the surprising result is that Smith's third work is, despite its faults, a wholly engrossing comic novel. To compress On Beauty into a neat little nutshell is impossible.
Salman Rushdie's mesmerizing new novel, Shalimar the Clown, opens with a barbaric, public murder.
Michael Cunningham's 1999 The Hours is a masterful novel -- perhaps the last great novel to close out the 20th century in American fiction.
It's that time of year again. If late December and early January are the months for year-summarizing Top Ten Lists, then summer previews undoubtedly dominate late April and early May.
Inarguably, one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary novelists is how to write about the events of September 11, 2001.
"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything," a pivotal character says early in Sin City, the film adaptation of writer/artist Frank Miller's groundbreaking graphic novel series.
In June 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study entitled "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." This 47-page report showed an overall decline in reading as an American activity, with a loss of 20 million potential readers over the last decade and a rate of decline that threatens to increase in the coming years.
In pioneering the style of New (read: literary) Journalism, grand social structures have always been the foundation of Tom Wolfe's fiction.
For those readers familiar with author Louis de Bernieres' successful novel, "Corelli's Mandolin," his latest work of fiction, "Birds Without Wings," appears at first glance to chart the same familiar territory. "Mandolin," published in 1994, presented us with a community in the throes of World War II and explored the near futility of individual relationships in a world where the country you served was of more importance than the person you were.
