Latest news with #novel
ABC News
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Amy Bloom, Ben Markovits and Barbara Truelove on love, basketball and monsters
Amy Bloom on her latest novel I'll Be Right Here about an unconventional chosen family, Ben Markovits goes on the road with his Booker Prize longlisted novel The Rest of Our Lives and Barbara Truelove's bonkers book about Dracula in space, Of Monsters and Mainframes. Amy Bloom is the American author of ten books (including White Houses) and her new historical novel, I'll Be Right Here, begins in wartime Paris and follows an unconventional, chosen family into the 21st century. The famous French author Collette has a cameo role too. Amy Bloom also shares the two things that matter to her most and why she writes about love in all its forms. Of Monsters and Mainframes is the debut novel of the Australian author and game designer Barbara Truelove. It's a genre mash of science fiction and pulp horror and is largely narrated by a sentient spaceship. The Rest of Our Lives is the 12th novel by British-American writer Benjamin Markovits and has recently been longlisted for the Booker Prize. It follows Tom, who's in a middle aged rut, as he sets out on a road trip across America and visits people from his past. Ben also talks about his failed career as a professional basketball player, the parallels between basketball and writing, and how a health crisis enriched the writing of this latest book.
The Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben review – rivals anything by Virginia Woolf
There's no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007. Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as 'a study of the human figure', and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own. The book is divided into six very different sections, including a stay in Venice, a treatise on masturbation, a description of a beloved dog's euthanasia and a vivid erotic daydream involving Robin Hood. It is hard, at first, to understand how these parts relate to one another, for this uncompromising book offers few obvious clues, but on second reading they shift and merge, and the payoff for this extra mental and imaginative effort is a truthful and vivid portrait of a highly particularised human consciousness. In the first section, At Torcello, Lavinia recalls a trip to the Venetian island in winter. She is there to see a Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, an image of motherhood that will echo through the book. While she is on the island she meets an English family for whom she will later babysit during a power cut, her relationship to children and the idea of family coming slowly into focus. Torcello and Venice itself are made strange by the things she notices, and by her attitude to them, both at the time and in recollection: a pregnant dog, a miserable rat, a canal's water, 'dull of eye'. 'In that sour and barren place, a spinster, who did not wish for the dry, un-rustling grass. I weep with mortification. Yet I was extremely happy.' Belben's angular syntax, frequent ellipses and unusual punctuation force the reader to slow down, think, and pay attention. It becomes clear that Lavinia is full of regrets. Having nursed her mother through a long final illness, she has not had sex for 10 years and wonders if others now see her as 'not among the fuckers of this world'. She had assumed she would marry and have children, but nobody ever proposed; in today's world, of course, she would not consider herself 'a shrivelled person … an old maid' at 36, but things were different in the 1970s, something which makes her lack of shame all the more remarkable: 'I have woken sopping and swollen, with a devil to suppress between my legs.' If this novel is as confessional as it seems, it is truly fearless: death, ageing, anorgasmia, loneliness, despair and madness are all here, jostling for attention, just as they do for many of us, for all we may seek to tune them out. Meanwhile, Lavinia learns to masturbate with an electric toothbrush. The Robin Hood section is a change of gear so abrupt it risks whiplash. As a child Lavinia identified with the idea of a forest-dwelling outlaw ('the myth of the greenwood … a cosy, complete, limited life'), and loved books about children who live outdoors: BB's classic Brendon Chase and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons also form part of the fantasy. But this book is no fairy story, instead a sensuous, funny account of a sexual encounter between Hood and the wife of Sir Richard atte Lee, a figure from early medieval ballads. This is a vision of sexuality as pure, natural and incorruptible, a vital component in what today's pop psychologists might call Lavinia's 'love map'. As the sections unfold, a succession of images and recollections relentlessly and obliquely illuminate one another in the manner of an Adam Curtis film. We glimpse Lavinia's relationship with her beloved but complicated mother ('something stiff and unyielding, fierce and loving') and learn more about her deep affinity for animals, particularly horses and dogs, both subjects of Belben's own later books; we understand her attitude to death, and to London; see the damage inflicted by her schooling, and witness her sustaining, at times ecstatic relationship with the natural world (her account of a trip to Scotland beats nearly all of today's nature writing into a cocked hat). She imagines the daughter she might have had, and names her 'Jessie', but dwells uneasily on the very different childhood she would doubtless have compared with her own: 'She would reckon a Forestry Commission plantation is a nice wood to walk in … she wouldn't have a clue about apples, how to pick them, how to store them: or pears.' You can feel Lavinia/Belben thinking and imagining her way through something that she might otherwise have had the opportunity to understand in practice: the inevitable distance between generations and the inexorable pace of change. 'I am worried that Jessie won't read,' she writes [italics her own]. 'It would be my greatest dread.' The last pages of Dreaming of Dead People dissolve into an impressionistic but carefully structured stream of consciousness, dwelling on ageing and mortality, loneliness and inner strength: extraordinary from any writer, but particularly from one in only her middle 30s. It is extremely beautiful, utterly convincing, and rivals anything by Virginia Woolf. 'There comes a time for making peace with oneself,' Belben writes, as Lavinia. 'Life as I have known it is ending. I am drying up … I am saying: here is a life, what do you make of it. And trying not to mind that you turn aside.' Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben is published by And Other Stories, (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Gary Shteyngart: Want to understand Russia? Then read this novel
Gary Shteyngart was born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart in Leningrad in 1972. His family, he says, was 'typically Soviet' and they lived in a square with a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin. They emigrated to the US when he was seven but not before he had written his first book: a 100-page comic novel. After a degree in politics and several years working for NGOs, Shteyngart took a trip to Prague that inspired his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which was published in 2002. The book, about young Russians living in Manhattan and the fictional Prava, won him awards and acclaim. Other books by Shteyngart include the novels Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, Lake Success and Our Country Friends as well as the memoir Little Failure. He has also worked on television shows including HBO's Succession and The Regime. His latest book is Vera, or Faith, about a dysfunctional family in America told from the perspective of Vera, a ten-year-old girl who is half-Korean, half-Jewish. Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler. I read the book when I was deep in my fully satirical mode as a twentysomething man. You couldn't stop me from satirising everything in sight. Now I'm middle-aged and full of love. Dogs, children, baristas — I love everyone I encounter. But when my spleen was much more active I craved satire and Barney's Version fit the bill perfectly. It's the story of an old man losing his marbles in Montreal and it is, in some ways, a kind of loud Canadian lament. (Who knew that was possible?) It's also the story of an old man scrutinising his life and trying to figure out where it all went wrong, which, as a 52-year-old I can now begin to understand on a different level. • What we're reading this week — by the Times books team I really love Bombay, so I love Maximum City by my old friend Suketu Mehta. It's an over-the-top take on an over-the-top city. No person I know so embodies a place as does Suketu. When I went on a tour of Bombay with him a decade or so ago we were hanging out with Bollywood stars, drinking sodas designed to elicit a belch and being chased out of housing estates by gangsters. In other words the reality is every bit as nuts as the book makes it out to be. Oh, and it's very, very funny, which is important for me. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, published in 1859. With the genocide being perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine I became more than weary of my Russian-born cultural self. I felt some Pushkin and Dostoevsky represented the worst of Russian experience, while Chekhov remained a sweetheart. Oblomov, the story of a Russian man who never really gets off his couch, is something else. It's what being a Russian is actually like. The instinct to let the world slide off your back (even as you lie on it) explains so much of why Russia is, was and always will be a nightmare. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Atlantic £16.99 ) is out now. To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Second novel by Garston author is a love letter to Watford's past
A novelist has released his much-anticipated second book, a heartfelt tale that captures the spirit of a bygone era. Soul Objective, by Garston writer Steve Johnson, is a coming-of-age drama set in late 1960s and early 1970s Watford. Steve's latest novel 'Soul Objective' is available in paperback and e-book. (Image: Steve Johnson) The story follows Joe Holland, a young man whose life takes an unexpected turn after a revelation on his 21st birthday. Steve said: "Change is so gradual that you barely even notice it, until one day you get to thinking about the places you frequented in your youth and realise that they are all gone. "For Watfordians of a certain vintage I hope this book will transport them back to a bygone time that no longer exists. But it did once. "I don't believe in living in the past but it's a nice place to visit. "When deciding where to locate my story it occurred to me that I'd never read, or even heard of, a novel based in Watford. "So, I decided to remedy that. It was a good place to grow up, and it probably still is." Soul Objective follows Joe as he travels from quiet south-west Hertfordshire to the streets of New York in search of answers. The novel references Watford landmarks like Top Rank, The New Penny, and The Coachmakers Arms. Read more Warner Bros. spotted filming in central Watford Save on puzzles this summer with Wentworth Puzzles More Harry Potter sets under construction as Leavesden filming ramps up Steve's debut novel, The Hidden Road Home, is a Second World War story set in St Albans, Harpenden, and RAF Northolt. He lives in Garston with his son Robert and their rescue dog, Purdy. Both books are available on Amazon in paperback and e-book format.
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The narrator of this novel is trained in — and ruined by — philosophy
'Fresh, Green Life,' the fifth book and second novel by Sebastian Castillo, tells the story of a man whose mind has been ruined by philosophy. It is New Year's Eve, and a 35-year-old writer named Sebastián Castillo does not know what to do. Should he leave Philadelphia and go up to New York, or stay at home, drinking domestic beers and watching YouTube videos?
