Have you ever found an author that you just want to recommend to everyone you meet? The type of author that you just want to read over and over again. I found this author in 2012 and I am slowly working through her backlist. The first book I read of hers I loved so much […]
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Blog: Perpetually Adolescent (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, Black Vodka, The Unloved, Things I Don't Want to Know, Man Booker, deborah levy, Book Reviews - Fiction, Swimming Home, Michael Kitto, Add a tag
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Karen Rile, Man Booker, Deborah Levy, Swimming Home, Add a tag
I consider it a triumph every time I snare a sensational book and actually read it.
So consider me triumphed again—discovering Swimming Home by Deborah Levy in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station bookstore (a tiny clutch of a space that has yet to fail my good-book greed) and reading it on the way to Penn and back, then in a fold of early morning hours.
This is the kind of book my friend Karen Rile will be able to explain to me, in full, when she reads it (she has ordered herself a copy). This is the kind of book I love—dangerously intelligent, smashed and dared, big themes on a small stage, more revealed by the brave elisions and planted repetitions, the near repetitions, than most authors can disclose declaratively. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker last year, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I stood in that bookstore at just past six in the morning, flipped through, and found lines like this:
Every moment with her was a kind of emergency, her words always too direct, too raw, too truthful.And:
She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.And:
Her long thighs were joined to the jutting hinges of her hips like the legs of the dolls she used to bend and twist as a child.The story is strange and seductive, its images bright. There's the desire to read fast, to know how it all ends (for won't it end calamitously?), but you know you have to read it slow; you know you'll miss everything if you don't. It concerns two vacationing couples, an old villa in Nice, and a young woman named Kitty Finch, a naked anorectic with green painted fingernails and a hunch about nature who is desperate to have Joe, the philandering poet half of one of the couples, read a poem she wrote just for him. There is also a girl named Nina in the mix—Joe's daughter—who is trying (as the reader is trying) to make sense of the rich senselessness.
There is a mediation on the idea of et cetera. Et cetera!
All right. I'm done. Buy it.
Blog: Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: angus cargill, Deborah Rogers, Jack Maggs, booksellers, Peter Carey, Man Booker, Charlotte Williams, Rights deal, Faber, Stephen Page, Add a tag
Faber will be publishing a new novel by Australian literary heavyweight Peter Carey next year, with the publisher already billing the dual-narrative title as a classic.
Add a CommentBlog: Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Seren, Man Booker, Charlotte Williams, Oneworld, sandstone press, Home, booksellers, digital, Amazon, Add a tag
The smaller publishers whose titles have been selected for the Man Booker longlist, including Seren Books, Sandstone Press and Oneworld, are preparing to reprint the titles and release digital versions to meet the anticipated increased demand.
Add a CommentBlog: Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: booksellers, Prizes, Picador, Julian Barnes, Man Booker, Todays Picks, Graeme Neill, Alan Hollinghurst, Jonathan Cape, Add a tag
William Hill has installed former Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst as the 5/1 favourite to clinch the prize for the second time for his novel The Stranger's Child (Picador).
The longlist was announced this afternoon and the bookmaker has moved quickly to lay out its odds. Julian Barnes is 6/1 second favourite for The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape).
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I think I read a review of this book in the NYT but wasn't sure it was for me. After reading your review with those stunning excerpts, it's going on my to read list. I shall look for it at our independent bookstore in town.
I just reviewed 2 books that I think you'd love: The Snow Child (literary/historical fiction) and Out of Nowhere (literary YA). One is somewhat magical and lyrical but true to life in frontier Alaska and the other is gritty realism about Somali immigrants and prejudice.