By Ed Nawotka Anchee Min’s new novel Pearl of China re-imagines the life of Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) from a Chinese perspective for what is perhaps the first time. She spoke about the book, which is told from the point of view of a contemporary of Buck, at a recent event at the Asia Society in New York. …
Review: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
By Gwendolyn Dawson Physicist Paolo Giordano’s debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, won Italy’s premier literary award, the Premio Strega, in 2008. Now available in the U.S. in an English translation, The Solitude of Prime Numbers explores the poignant relationship that develops between two misfits, Alice and Mattia. Alice, an anorexic with a limp left over from a childhood skiing accident, resists …
Are There Still Topics Too Taboo for Fiction?
By Edward Nawotka Today’s lead story by Chip Rossetti discusses the popularity of Essam Youssef’s heroin-fueled novel 1/4 Gram, which is set in the world Cairo’s high society. Some of the popularity of the novel is that it portrays a world — a taboo world — little seen by readers in the Arab world. The same could be said for …
Junkies on the Nile: Egyptians Addicted to Drug-Fuelled Debut Novel
By Chip Rossetti CAIRO: For the past two years, Egypt’s bestselling novel has been a story about a group of privileged young Cairenes whose comfortable lives are shattered by heroin. Weighing in at a hefty 635 pages, Essam Youssef’s first novel, A ¼ Gram, sheds light on the taboo problem of drug use among Egypt’s upper-middle class. Set in the …
Review: Solar by Ian McEwan
Reviewed by Gwendolyn Dawson Solar, Ian McEwan’s eleventh novel, follows the troubled career and love life of 53-year-old physicist Michael Beard. Beard won the Nobel Prize in physics for work he completed as a young man but, after five failed marriages, is now trapped in a decades-long slump of “no new ideas.” Living the life of an aimless bureaucrat saddled with speech …
Review: The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu
By Gwendolyn Dawson Jack, the first-person narrator of Mathias Malzieu’s most recent novel, is born in Edinburgh on an uncommonly cold day in April 1874. A clever midwife saves the newborn from certain death by surgically implanting a cuckoo clock in his chest to regulate his weak heart. Abandoned by his mother and sporting a loudly ticking clock for a heart, Jack …
Using Fiction to Tell the Truth
Portuguese journalist and novelist José Rodrigues dos Santos discusses how fiction can be a better way to tell a true story. By José Rodrigues dos Santos LISBON, PORTUGAL: The American Super Stallion helicopters landed in the Kuwaiti desert amongst much dust and panache, and the US Marines took position in the sandy grounds in full combat gear, pointing their guns …
The Billion Copy Opportunity
By Lewis Manalo CHINA: By now it’s a scene we in the West are familiar with: a swordsman or — swordswoman — makes an acrobatic leap to a stone-tiled rooftop and sets off in pursuit of a masked bandit. The swordsman leaps from roof to roof, across ridiculous distances and with such balletic grace, he seems to be on the edge …
The Future with Flippers: A Cautionary Tale for the Book Biz
By Edward Nawotka “So, in 2020, we’ll all arrive in one-piece jersey romper suits woven out of pulped hardback books and synthetic slippers made from discarded Kindle e-readers.” Thus begins Tyler Brûlé’s satirical vision of what the world might look like in another ten years if the iPad and other touch screen devices become dominant — and we don’t find a …
Review: Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
By Gwendolyn Dawson This bleak novel tracks the slow destruction of a marriage and, ultimately, a family. Irene, a failed historian, and her husband Gil, an artist who’s grown famous off of his revealing portraits of Irene, are the parents of three precocious children, including a math genius and a budding artist. While the love between Irene and Gil is …