The world that Olive Kitteridge lives in is one where the people, the interactions, and the locations are all very ordinary, yet very real. Elizabeth Strout's style of writing is simple yet precise: she attends to speech habits and ordinary actions in a way that reveals the complexity of even the commonest of situations and relationships.
I met her at a conference in Ireland, where she discussed how the characters in her books just "come to her." I took this to mean that she is always tuned into the ways people struggle to plot their lives and interactions, and Strout presents this as more important than plot.
So much fiction these days is aiming at becoming a movie or series, requiring action and plot twists and elaborate mise en scene. The Olive Kitteridge stories touch you gently, but they let you know that all humans are complex and have interesting ways of seeing and possibly overcoming their human problems.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Number One New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton
'A terrific writer' Zadie Smith
'A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own' Hilary Mantel
'A novel to treasure' Sunday Times
Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her.
I saw Percival Everett discussing his newest book, James, along with his other novels, especially Erasure, which was made into a wonderful movie (American Fiction), at the Virginia Festival of the Book. His insistence that he is irredeemably ironic made me into a potential fan.
Dr. No naturally bends the genre of spy novels and films, especially of the James Bond sort, into an updated take in an imaginal world that hinges on a philosophical pun (viz. "Nothing" as an object of discourse and contemplation). Everett purposely reorients Flemingesque plot elements such that assumptions about the order of time and cultural principles like race are punctured. He has a sense of humor very close to mine, with numerous multilingual and multidisciplinary puns and in-jokes.
Not everyone will like this writing: Everett is erudite and ironic and comic all at the same time, and while his writing is very literate, it may not be as deep as its literacy would seem to suggest.
A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break…
I was reading Mick Herron's Slough House novels before Apple TV turned them into a great series (which I also love). I take it the Slough House novels are done - a couple of the leading characters have been killed off in the most recent novels, so unless Herron has a surprise in store... This novel is a kind of prequel.
It takes place in two times and places, one in Cold War Berlin, the other around the time that Slough House was being formed (before Jackson Lamb was called that, e.g.). I'm not sure whether this novel would be as much fun for someone who couldn't place all the characters, with their cover names in Berlin, into their current roles in Slough House. But for anyone who has read more than a couple of the Slow Horses novels, this novel covers the time in London when MI5's reputation was tarnished by misadventure and political interference.
So, there's a kind of foreshadowing that is actually retrospective, since this comes last in the sequence of the series. It is therefore akin to LeCarre's final Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, which in a way wraps up the whole exercise of LeCarre's "Circus" spy fiction. It makes me a bit sad to have Herron leave Slough House, but he's a wonderful writer, hilarious but serious.
Long before Buffy and even Dracula–the word ‘vampire’ designated a common villager in the Slavic regions of Europe who had either died an unnatural or violent death and thus could not be buried within the village’s perimeter. Like witches in Western Europe, the vampire functioned as a scapegoat, and it was often important to designate seers who could identify who might have become a vampire.
This is the first book to trace the history of the belief in vampires and the methods of identifying and dispatching them. Linguistically analyzing the original meaning of the ‘vampir’, the book follows the cultural changes in meaning over the next millennium. This book examines how the vampire and slayer became the basis for Dracula and beyond.
