A new rotation of books on TLC
September 2, 2009
New books have been added to My Reading Table with reasons why.
Also added, a brief explanation of how this table works; likely a description for how all reading tables work.
The additions to My Reading Table:
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
- Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
- Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition edited by Margaret Scott
- Prague in Danger The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War by Peter Demetz
- Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (This was briefly removed from My Reading Table and on the Currently Reading list. Now it’s back on.)
The removals from My Reading Table:
The Collector by John Fowles
I picked this up last night, after reading The Cry of the Sloth. The first novel by the author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman published in 1963.
The dust jacket flap of the fourth edition says, “Rarely does a publisher introduce a novel of such devastating power.” This is now on the Currently Reading list.
Putting books to be reviewed on My Reading Table doesn’t mesh with the way the table works; hence the removal of these two new releases, soon to hit Currently Reading:
- Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece by Declan Kiberd
- The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
A bookshop across the pond
July 14, 2009
Two books with September publication dates in the United States, featured in the post Headlights on September, are already available for purchase at the London Review Bookshop online – or at 14 Bury Place, in London’s Bloomsbury district, should you be heading that way: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd
I recently subscribed to the London Review of Books and discovered the availability in an advertisement for the shop. The discovery comes with a bit of a ‘duh!’ factor, considering the books are by U.K. authors.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. He became a household literary name with the novel The Remains of the Day (1989) about an aging British butler. It won Ishiguro the Booker Prize and became a movie staring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It’s also his first novel with a British protagonist set in England – his two previous novels (1982, 1986) feature Japanese protagonists.
Kiberd is an Irish writer born in Dublin 1951. He’s a professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. The Irish Times describes him as, “an individual given to responding with his heart, as well as his intellect.”
Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us has been published in the U.K. with a slightly different subtitle from what we’ll see in the U.S.: “The Art of Everyday Living” versus “The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece.”
U.K. Edition
Also of note: A. S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book, with a U.S. publication date in October, is also already published across the pond.
Here’s what the London Review Bookshop writes about it:
“A.S. Byatt’s latest novel, ‘easily the best thing [she] has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990)’ according to Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, is a panoramic four-family saga set between 1895 and the end of the First World War.” (Read more.)
All this in case you can’t wait for publication of the U.S. editions. (I couldn’t.) Keep in mind eagerness costs more money. Delivery takes 7 working days, so they tell me. Not bad.
