Best Books of 2008 by The NYT

FICTION

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.

In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.” (Excerpt)

A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.

The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears. (First Chapter)

NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.

O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations. (First Chapter)

2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.

Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered. (Excerpt)

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. (Excerpt)

NONFICTION

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer.
Doubleday, $27.50.

Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s anti­terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation’s history.

THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.” (First Chapter)

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.

This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion. (First Chapter)

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.

In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” (First Chapter)

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.

The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.” Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist’s command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life. (First Chapter)

John Updike

"John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass."
(from the New York Times obituary: John Updike)
A link to a Salon interview: John Updike
A link to a New York Times interview: John Updike

Library Thing

This is wonderful place to organize a library:

Esse é um lugar incrível prá organizar uma biblioteca:

http://www.librarything.com

The Shape of Water, de Andrea Camilleri

Médio.

Undressed Art: Why We Draw, de Peter Steinhart

Estou lendo esse, devagar. Um pouco hoje, mais um pouco daqui três dias. Tá na pilha da mesa.

Sacred Games, de Vikram Chandra

916 páginas.
Interessante, vai crescendo, os personagens são possíveis, complexos.
Tem um bandidão, tipo Godfather; tem um policial honesto, se comparado com o resto da polícia de Mumbai; tem uma miss Índia que vira atriz, mas sendo prostituta antes. Tem um pouco de tudo. Mas o personagem central é Mumbai, e as pessoas que fazem a cidade. A gente sente até o cheiro da cidade, e esse não é agradável.

8 de setembro, Dia Internacional da Alfabetização

Booker Prize Short List

The judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 have announced this year’s six shortlisted novels.
The six titles shortlisted are:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Oliver Sacks

September 1, 2007

Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty as ‘Artist’

By MOTOKO RICH

Attracted by his breadth of interests, ranging from schizophrenia to music, Columbia University has appointed Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer, as its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation.

Beginning next week, Dr. Sacks, who has been a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for the past 42 years, is leaving to become a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, a post he will occupy in addition to the new artist position.

The new appointment will allow Dr. Sacks, the author of 10 books and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to range freely across Columbia’s departments, teaching, giving public lectures, conducting seminars, seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members. Many of the details of his appointment have yet to be worked out, but among other things, he will be teaching in the university’s creative writing department as well as at the medical school.

“My first year at Columbia is going to be, to some extent, a year of experiment and exploration,” Dr. Sacks said. “I very much look forward to meeting students and faculty and doing classes that could be about almost anything, from music to psychiatry to whatever.”

Dr. Sacks, 74, was born in London and moved to the United States in the early 1960s. He is perhaps best known as the author of “Awakenings,” which chronicles his treatment of patients with encephalitic lethargica (otherwise known as sleeping sickness) and was made into a 1990 movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Another well-known book is “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” a 1985 collection of essays about various patients with neurological problems. There are more than one million copies of all his books in print in the United States, and his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf in October.

Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia, said Dr. Sacks’s appointment exemplified the university’s effort to bridge the gap between the study of neuroscience and other disciplines in which scholars work to understand human behavior, including economics, law and art history.

Dr. Sacks’s appointment is “a commitment both to having one of the great clinical neuroscientists in our midst and one of the great writers about this subject, but also a commitment to try to take that and reach out to other fields and human activities,” Mr. Bollinger said.

The university has committed $20 million to expanding the study of neuroscience to include an interdisciplinary approach, and last year it received a donation worth more than $200 million from Dawn M. Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation to build a new center to house the university’s Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative, which will help apply neuroscience to multiple areas of scholarship.

For his part, Dr. Sacks said he was looking forward to returning to the classroom. At Albert Einstein, he said, he had not taught formally since 1973. “I’ve actually missed it,” he said. He added: “In a way, for me, this is a real entrance into university life such as I’ve never had, rather than a part-time medical appointment. I’m excited, because, in a way, I’ve been a sort of an outsider or freelancer or maverick for the last 40 years, and here I think it will be quite an intense sort of full relationship with Columbia.”

Dr. Sacks said that although he was looking forward to exploring disciplines outside medicine, his clinical work would remain a focus, not least because it inspires so much of his writing.

“The medical part of my life is very, very central,” he said, recalling that his father, also a physician, kept coming out of retirement to go back to work. “When he was 90, we said, ‘Pop, at least stop the house calls,’ and he said, ‘I’ll stop everything else but keep the house calls.’ I want to see patients as long as I am able.”

The appointment grew out of conversations that Dr. Sacks had with several people, including Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in medicine and a professor at Columbia, and Gregory Mosher, director of the Arts Initiative at Columbia, which aims to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to the arts into the undergraduate experience. Dr. Sacks, Mr. Mosher said, is an exemplar of the “Hey, kids, you can do more than one thing at a time” message.

Dr. Sacks’s appointment at the medical school is being financed by a $1 million donation made over five years by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, one of several foundations financed by the Sainsbury family of Britain, which owns a grocery chain.

On Friday Dr. Sacks will give his first lecture, at Columbia’s psychiatry department, where he will talk about music and neuroscience. He said the move to Columbia capped a gradual transition he has been making over the past decade.

“I used to be more withdrawn or isolated,” he said. “Now I love meeting colleagues and finding out what other people are doing.”

Lista do Guardian

If you haven't read these by Christmas ...

From Fidel Castro to Germaine Greer, Philip Roth to Alice Sebold, The Observer's literary team pick this autumn's top 10 must-reads

Robert McCrum, Alex Clark and Emily Stokes
Sunday August 26, 2007

Observer

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 6 October

The haunting title, a stage direction from Hamlet, seems to say it all. Philip Roth's first Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer, was published in 1979; now, almost three decades later and after a series that has encompassed such breathtaking works as American Pastoral and The Human Stain, Roth's alter ego makes what sounds very much like his final appearance. This time, Zuckerman returns to New York after 10 years' seclusion on an isolated mountainside and, almost immediately, finds himself sucked into the worldliness from which he has been in flight. Revolving around encounters with a beautiful but fading woman, once the muse of Roth's mentor, the now dead EI Lonoff, a young couple keen to escape post-9/11 Manhattan and a rapacious literary biographer, Exit Ghost conjures a man raging against the dying of the light, in a characteristically Rothian meditation on the nature of artistic endeavour, creative rivalry, inspiration and, naturally, the imminence of the end.

We say
'For a decade now, we have lived with the glory of late Philip Roth. To punctuate his last four indelible novels of America and their discontents at the turn of the century, Roth has developed a periodic habit of making a sharp inward turn, an unblinking memento mori, as if to stir in himself the urgency for another major assault on his times.' - The Observer

Meg Rosoff, What I Was
Puffin £10.99, 30 August

By the author of How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2004, and Just in Case, which won the Carnegie Medal in 2007, What I Was is a tale for both young teenagers and adults with a plot that is at once thrilling and sensitively told. The young protagonist, a self-conscious and awkward troublemaker, is running cross-country on the cliffs of East Anglia when he discovers Finn, who lives in a solitary hut by the sea, as if having fallen 'through a small tear in the universe'. Told by a man who is 'a century old' and set in a nostalgic childhood world that is, like the coastline, crumbling away, this is a memorable rites-of-passage novella about the intensity of first love.

They say
'She could persuade me to believe almost anything.' - Mark Haddon on How I Live Now

Robert Harris, The Ghost
Hutchinson £18.99, 4 October

Robert Harris, formerly political editor of this newspaper, burst into popular consciousness with his bestselling thriller Fatherland in 1992. More recently, he has devoted his energies to historical fiction set in the ancient world (Pompeii, Imperium), exploring the glories of Rome as a metaphor for the pax Americana. In The Ghost, he reportedly returns to his thriller-writing and political commentating roots in a tale of the literary skulduggery surrounding the memoirs of a recently retired British Prime Minister. Set in the out-of-season paradise of Martha's Vineyard, it describes how ex-PM Adam Lang attempts to explain his career to his ghost writer and set the record straight. Harris is adamant that the similarities with Tony Blair are matched by the dissimilarities, but there's no doubt that this thriller, published to coincide with the Labour party conference, will be read as a roman a clef of New Labour's end-of-term travails. Written at top speed for the autumn season, copies have yet to be released for review, but Harris has form as a master of political narrative and it's safe to predict this will be a must-read for the political class this autumn.

He says
'I take the Arnold Bennett view. Every time he finished a novel, he bought a yacht, which meant he had to write another novel.'

Fidel Castro, My Life
Edited by Ignacio Ramonet
Allen Lane £25, 4 October

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has told readers that his friend Fidel is a 'fantastic reader' and that, on Marquez's recommendation, he had read Dracula one night rather than important state documents. But, save these literary revelations, for years the closest many readers have come to learning about the personal life of Fidel Castro is through news stories of his fading health. But now Ignacio Ramonet, well-known activist and editor of Le Monde diplomatique, presents us with a series of probing interviews in which the elusive leader describes his life from the 1950s to the present day. He reportedly discusses his parents, his earliest influences and his friendship with Che Guevara, as well as recounting his interpretations of political events, such as the beginning of the revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the Carter years and Cuban migration to the US.

He says
'I began a revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I'd do it with 10 or 15 of absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith or a plan of action.'

Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before It Falls
Viking £17.99, 6 September

Jonathan Coe has surprised readers with his eighth novel by abandoning the satirical style of works such as What a Carve Up!, Bollinger winner The Rotters' Club and its sequel The Closed Circle. Whereas the social and political settings of these novels were painted with stylised flair - the Thatcherite Britain of What a Carve Up! or the Seventies Birmingham of The Rotters' Club - Coe's new novel is about time itself, stretching over 65 years and three generations, and split between the present and the past.

The tragic narrative of mothers and daughters is spoken by elderly Rosamund as she sits in her Shropshire home and records her voice on to four cassette tapes for Imogen, a blind girl.

It is divided not into chapters, but into photographs, which are described with such vivid nostalgia as to blur real history and personal fiction, the physical and the conjectured. This is not only Coe's answer to the criticism that his previous novels have lacked visual images; it is a deeply metaphorical novel told with a purposely self-conscious pace, about the power of description to illuminate the past and about the ghostly effect of other people's imagination and memory on our own sense of self. The Rain Before It Falls revolves with the sometimes overly heavy momentum of the tragic, but narrates childhood episodes with such truth that they might be remembered as one's own.

They say
'With his hyper-lucid prose and eye for the whimsical, the absurd and the quintessentially human, Jonathan Coe is Britain's best contemporary fictional chronicler' - Will Self

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Capitalism
Allen Lane £25, 20 September

In this landmark history of the past three decades, the award-winning journalist, theorist, film-maker and author of No Logo attempts to explode the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Based on new historical research and four years of reporting in disaster zones, the book's premise is simple: America's 'free market' policies dominate the world through the exploitation of people and countries which have been 'disaster-shocked' - disorientated by wars, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Klein gives a freshness to examples that feel familiar - US oil companies in Iraq, tourist resorts in tsunami-destroyed beaches, privatisation after hurricane Katrina - by placing them in a wider context that includes Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 and the Falklands conflict in 1982.

They say
'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial and scary as hell' - John le Carre

Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife
Bloomsbury £20, 3 September

The tone of this literary-historical study, marketed as 'Germaine Greer's most contentious work since The Female Eunuch', is argumentative from the start, as Greer collates what she sees as the unfairly prejudiced attitudes towards Anne Hathaway presented by (male) literary historians from Theobald in 1752 to Stephen Greenblatt in 2004.The 'Shakespeare wallahs' have, writes Greer, created a Bard 'in their own image, that is to say, incapable of relating to women'.

A readable and likably humane book, which straddles scholarly research and imagination with some shaky but often entertaining results.

We say
'Greer is ... worth reading as much for her deliberately contentious and wrong-headed arguments as when she is right, and probably more enjoyable' - The Observer

Zadie Smith (editor), The Book Of Other People
Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 1 November

Anthologies of new fiction brought together under the editorship of a practising novelist can often suffer from diverse voices being yoked to one another under the aegis of an ill-defined or constricting manifesto. Zadie Smith makes it clear that this is the last thing she wanted; although she asked her charges to write a story named for, and based on, one fictional character, her aim was not to impose any other rules. The likes of David Mitchell, Nick Hornby, AM Homes and Aleksandr Hemon duly complied. Also here is Smith's regular artistic sidekick Dave Eggers, whose creative-writing charity 826NYC is the book's beneficiary.

She says
'The [aim was] a lively demonstration of the fact that there are as many ways to create "character" (or deny the possibility of "character") as there are writers.'

Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon
Picador £16.99, 16 October

Alice Sebold, the bestselling American author of Amazon cult title The Lovely Bones, knows how to hook her readers into her fevered, imaginative world. 'When all is said and done,' The Almost Moon begins, 'killing my mother came easily.' In the course of the next 24 hours, both reader and protagonist will discover that killing never comes 'easily', as Sebold subjects her audience to a macabre descent into hell. Transgression is Sebold's default setting, derived perhaps from her rape at the age of 18. The Almost Moon narrates the life of an averagely sensual woman who crosses the line of suburban normality into scarcely imaginable horror. A highly commercial new fiction, this will be welcomed by admirers of Sebold's dirty realism, quasi-poetic style and helter-skelter storytelling gifts. Amazingly, she manages to make her gothic tale as moving as it is unquestionably gripping.

She says
'I've always been weird, but I'm very happy with my weirdness.'

Charlie Higson, Hurricane Gold
Puffin £12.99, 6 September

The fourth in Higson's Young Bond series, this latest instalment promises to give 007 enthusiasts in short trousers all the thrills and suspense of previous adventures (Silverfin, Blood Fever and Double or Die). After a nervous start, Higson has got into his stride with this series and Hurricane Gold will supply more action, more demented crime and more flesh-crawling deaths than ever before. Set far from Bond's alma mater (Eton) on the island of Lagrimas Negras, a safe haven for the most deviant crims, Bond finds himself negotiating his way past a sequence of deadly obstacles. It succeeds, though Fleming would probably raise an eyebrow at its length.

We say
'Charlie Higson's task is unenviable, but he's well equipped. Bond was his specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind.' - The Observer

Best of the rest

1. Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
(Profile £10.99) 6 Sept

The charming tale of a librarian who awakens in Her Majesty such a great passion for reading that her public duties begin to suffer.

2. Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River
(Chatto & Windus £25) 6 Sept

History of the river from source to sea, covering the literature, architecture, trade and mythology that it has borne.

3. David Thewlis, The Late Hector Kipling
(Picador £16.99) 7 Sept

Satirical first novel by stage actor-turned-promising writer, about competitive London artist Hector Kipling, whose life begins to unravel into chaos.

4. Caryl Phillips, Foreigners
(Harvill Secker £16.99) 13 Sept

A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction and fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak of the place and role of the outsider in English society.

5. Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
(Bloomsbury £17.99) 17 Sept

An intimate novel about love, loss, memory and family stretches across time and generations from northern California to rural France.

6. Peter Conrad, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins
(Thames & Hudson £24.95) 17 Sept

The Observer critic takes us on a dazzling exploration of the origins of creativity and the imagination.

7. Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
(Hamish Hamilton £16.99) 27 Sept

Polemical 'interplanetary' love story in which humans and robots plan to inhabit a fresh, new planet, having destroyed their own.

8. Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
(Virago £25) 4 Oct

Professor Bourke analyses what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence.

9. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-32
(Jonathan Cape £30) 1 Nov

Penultimate volume in this Whitbread Prize-winning series by art historian Richardson.

10. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
(Heinemann £20) 1 Nov

A survey of the movement that extended from Baudelaire to Beckett - and beyond.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

A Instrução dos Amantes

Inês Pedrosa, escritora portuguesa, nascida em 62. Indicação do
Arthur. Bom, cada frase é importante, vou ter que ler de novo daqui alguns anos. Tenho a impressão de ter "pulado" algumas coisas.

Libraries - Linda foto

About Alice

Acabei "About Alice", de Calvin Trillin. Legal.
Mas já tinha lido a maior parte na New Yorker.

On Chesil Beach

Acabei On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan). Bom. Muito bom. Mas acho que gostei mais de Saturday.

Prá crianças

Ótimo prá crianças.
Mummy Laid an Egg, de Babette Cole.