Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse was inspired by a real-world beach — which sold for £80,000 at an auction today. According to the Daily Mail, “The 76-acre Upton Towans beach in Gwithian, Cornwall, overlooks the lighthouse situated on the headland at nearby Godrevy Island. Virginia Woolf spent many holidays there with her family as [...]
Had a lovely chat Saturday night with an author at yet another author’s book-launch party. To celebrate her fun but also incredibly informative new book Crazy fror Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters, Eve Kushner hosted a Kanji Festival at a Japanese restaurant in Albany, California, complete with music, games, a [...]
British novelist Matt Haig has a knack for capturing death: not as, say, a writer of mysteries or thrillers or horror fiction would, but in a bitingly, achingly realistic way, in non-genre novels whose darkness takes on a million subtle colors and textures. Haig’s debut novel, The Dead Fathers Club – published in 2007 – enters [...]
Some are calling the BBC’s new adaptation of Oliver Twist anti-Semitic because its co-star Timothy Spall portrays the thief-impresario Fagin as unmistakably, over-the-top Jewish. “I must have missed a few subtle literary points in college when I was taking a Charles Dickens seminar. I missed the spot where Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is wearing a gigondo yarmulke,” [...]
Now You’re One of Us, a thriller new in paperback from bestselling Japanese novelist Asa Nonami (and translated into English by Michael Volek and Mitsuko Volek), starts off so strong. Against her mother’s wishes, attractive if somewhat naive young Noriko has just married the eldest son in a strange family that lives in a large [...]
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg’s groundbreaking semiautographical 1964 novel about life as a young schizophrenic, has just been reissued by Henry Holt.
Well, The Vagrants, the long-awaited new novel by mega-mondo-multi-award-winning author Yiyun Li, has finally arrived. Li, who now lives in California, was born in Beijing in 1972, so she grew up during the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution and saw much of its aftermath. Thus this novel, uh, doesn’t make communism look good. At [...]
You know that current trend in which historical novels have, as their protagonists, actual celebrities who actually lived? A certain sector of novelists “re-animates” such flesh-and-blood people as Sappho, Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Conan Doyle. Last week we got a new one in which Jack London gallivants around Hawaii. Well, now there’s a new twist [...]
Genuine real-life historical figures who actually lived had actual experiences: birth, life, death, interspersed with specific incidents, dialogues, emotions and actions that actually happened. Shouldn’t this be enough for us? After death, these figures remain with us in memories, in films and photographs, in documents they wrote and documents written about them. Yet a certain [...]
Have you ever wondered what Peter Pan’s been up to since … well, since Peter Pan? Revealing yet again its increasing tendency not to leave good enough alone, Disney has launched a series of sequels. This one follows Peter and the Starcatchers, and we find the flying boy sallying forth into pirate territory, where he [...]