By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others. "For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now …
The Lowland: Jhumpa Lahiri
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, 339 pages.Review by Rishad Patell This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a powerful and riveting story. Set in Calcutta post independence, the book is the story of two brothers through the complex and tumultuous period of the birth of the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. The two brothers, …
The File on H: Ismail Kadare
Translated from Jusuf Vrioni's French translation by David Bellos.Published by Arcade Publishing, 1998, 192 pages. Original version in Albanian published in 1981. Two naïve Irish-American scholars travel to Albania in the early 1930s in search of the origins of epic poetry—in particular, of Homer’s epics. And the only place where oral epic poetry still exists …
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin
Published by Penguin / Viking, 2009, 256 pages.Review by Joannah Caborn Wengler This book describes the first two years that a young girl, Eilis, from Ireland spends in Brooklyn when she emigrates to the US in the 1950s. On the face of it, it ought to be a rollicking ride: with a sudden departure, a …
The Garden of Evening Mists: Tan Twan Eng
Published by Canongate Canons, 2012, 352 pages.Review by Rishad Patell The Garden of Evening Mists is the story of Yun Ling Teoh, a survivor of a Japanese POW camp in Malaya during World War 2. Now a lawyer, Yun Ling returns to the hills of the Cameron Highlands to fulfil her dead sister’s dream of …
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter: Malcolm Mackay
Published by Mantle / Pan, 2013, 256 pages. A gangster book with a difference. We follow a professional hitman, Calum MacLean, as he figures out how he is going to kill Lewis Winter, a smalltime drug dealer who has become a thorn in the side of a powerful criminal gang. The book is set in …
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Re-reading ‘The Birds’
Review by Usha RamanThe Birds and Other Stories published by Virago Press. The story was first published in 1952. Courtesy: http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=505 I picked up a back issue of Zoetrope All Story, a magazine launched by Francis Ford Coppola last week, and, leafing through it, came across a stark full page illustration to the story that …
I am Malala—The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban: Malala Yousafzai
Review by Lesley O’Dowd National news in countries around the world showed 16 year old Malala addressing the United Nations in July 2013. Viewers heard her eloquent plea for the right to an education. Since recommencing in England the education interrupted by the near-fatal Taliban bullet in her head, Malala has produced an autobiography, co-authored …
Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome: Jérôme Ferrari
Review by Lesley O’Dowd Published by Actes Sud, 2013, 208 pages. Over-intellectual, abstract… I sighed when I heard the Prix Goncourt 2012 had gone to a novel about student philosophers who decide to run a bar in Corsica--and that the bar will meet the fate of Rome falling to the barbarians in 430, as commented …
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Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
Neil Gaiman's impassioned talk on the importance of reading and daydreaming as a gateway to our imaginations. I feel I could have written this (though not quite so eloquently) in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. I'm sure a lot of you do too. He says that he attended a talk …
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Talking About Books 