Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder is published by Alma Books and is currently being adapted for cinema by Film Four/Cowboy Films. His non-fiction work, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, is published by Granta Books. McCarthy is also General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, described by the art press as ‘a semi-fictitious avant-garde organisation.’ “From [...]
Archive for January, 2010
Tom McCarthy’s top 10 European modernists
Posted in Literature on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Sam Taylor’s top 10 books about forgetting
Posted in Literature on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Sam Taylor was born in 1970 and is the former pop culture correspondent for the Observer. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published to high acclaim in 2005. He lives in France with his young family. His second novel, The Amnesiac (Faber, £12.99), tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with [...]
Dan Rhodes’s top 10 short books
Posted in Literature on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Dan Rhodes is the author of Anthropology and Timoleon Vieta Come Home. His latest novel, Gold, is the tale of a Japanese woman finding her place in a small, Welsh seaside community. It is a short book and, according to the book’s publisher, Canongate, read it and “you’ll laugh, probably cry and you’ll be finished [...]
Fiona Campbell’s top 10 books set in Japan
Posted in Literature on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Psychology and zoology graduate Fiona Campbell began writing after moving to Tokyo. On her return she wrote Death of a Salaryman as part of a creative writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. “I fell in love with Japanese fiction after reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto,” she explains. “I was 21 at the time and immediately [...]
Alex Barclay’s top 10 psychological thrillers
Posted in Literature on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Dublin-born Barclay has attracted much praise for her debut novel Darkhouse. Her second, The Caller, is published in paperback this week and promises another pacy excursion into murderous motivations. Here she selects fiction’s most compulsive criminal minds. 1. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson You’d probably like Sheriff Lou Ford if you lived in [...]
The paternity matrix
Posted in Law, Weird cases on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
In the film The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays a character who moves in and out of the real world. He might have thought he was having a similar experience while defending a recent legal action in Canada. Reeves was sued by Karen Sala, a woman he said he had never met but who claimed that [...]
Too Big to Reform
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
We’ve been here before. Not with this much melodrama, maybe. It didn’t take a rakish Senate candidate in a pick-up truck to stop George W. Bush’s push for Social Security reform in 2005. MSNBC wasn’t around in 1994, so we didn’t get to watch Keith Olbermann’s head explode on live TV during the defeat of [...]
Italy’s African Heroes
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Human rights, Politics, tagged Italy on January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
WHEN I was a teenager here, kids used to shoot dogs in the head. It was a way of gaining confidence with a gun, of venting your rage on another living creature. Now it seems human beings are used for target practice. This month, rioting by African immigrants broke out in Rosarno, in southern Italy, [...]
Lonely Hearts, Like Minds
Posted in Living on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The eccentric personal ads of ‘romantically awkward eggheads.’ If you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain . . . then you’re probably stuck in 1979. That’s when songwriter Rupert Holmes released “Escape”—soon renamed “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”—about a guy who’s so bored with his “lady” that he answers a newspaper personal [...]
Clinton for Haiti Czar?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Haiti on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
If the country is ever to develop it will need less cronyism and more transparency. In the news from Haiti over the past two weeks, images of a grieving Bill Clinton have been almost as constant as the pictures of the earthquake victims themselves. Everywhere you look, the former president seems to appear—expressing his sorrow [...]
The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Law, Other on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores were weaponized. The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. [...]
Hammering Honduras
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Honduras on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The State Department keeps slapping an ally. Honduras will inaugurate president-elect Porfirio Lobo this week, two months after one of the world’s most recently famous little countries held a successful democratic election. So we are left to wonder why the United States State Department is still trying to hammer anyone there who dared to participate [...]
James Patterson Inc.
Posted in Literature on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Like most authors, James Patterson started out with one book, released in 1976, that he struggled to get published. It sold about 10,000 copies, a modest, if respectable, showing for a first novel. Last year, an estimated 14 million copies of his books in 38 different languages found their way onto beach blankets, airplanes and [...]
Magnificence on Cave Walls
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Inanke’s prehistoric paintings are a celebration of life The trail to the great cave of Inanke in southern Zimbabwe begins confidently with arrows painted on bare patches of granite and soon vanishes into four miles of often pathless wandering through fields of shoulder-high grass, dense scrub forests and formidable thorn bushes. Without the direction of [...]
Off-base camp
Posted in Energy and Environment on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
A mistaken claim about glaciers raises questions about the UN’s climate panel Still there THE idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the [...]
Looking for Clues in a Distant Planet’s Atmosphere
Posted in Space on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life For the first time, scientists have been able to analyze the atmosphere of a distant planet. The success could prove a milestone on the road toward finding life beyond our solar system. The heart of European efforts to analyze distant planets is located in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert, [...]
Vexed Messaging
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Can cellphones help improve a show? It happened to me for the first time in Dallas last May. I was wrapped up in a performance of Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars.” Suddenly my attention was distracted by a mysterious glow. I glanced away from the stage and saw that the woman sitting in front [...]
Modern science’s race to stay ahead of global terrorists and political assassins began with some devious poisoners in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1906, Belle Gunness started running personal ads in Midwestern papers. She described herself as an attractive widow with a lush Indiana farm property, interested in an equally affluent new husband. [...]
‘Tell your grandmother Haiti just had a big earthquake’
Posted in Other, tagged Haiti on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
A diary of waiting Tuesday, Jan. 12 In the hours between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., I often say to friends, our house descends into total chaos. By the time I greet my husband at the door around 6 p.m., it’s well underway: Leo, our 8-month-old, screams to be fed. Riley, now 2, is pitching [...]
The leased life
Posted in Living on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Why own anything? In June 2008, when Punsri Abeywickrema was working on his backyard in San Mateo, Calif., he found himself in need of a wheelbarrow. He didn’t own one, but his neighbor did, and he had borrowed it the previous weekend; due to space constraints, he preferred not to buy one himself. Yet he [...]
Sweet tooth fairies
Posted in The Word, tagged January 24 2010 on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The rise of a language mashup Have you ever met a sweet tooth fairy? A sweet tooth fairy isn’t an especially congenial version of the mythical childhood creature, nor is it an epithet for the actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who plays a kind of muscular lunk of a tooth fairy in a new movie. [...]
The week ahead
Posted in The Week ahead, tagged January 24 2010 on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Barack Obama’s first state-of-the-union-address • A BRUISED Barack Obama is set to deliver his first state-of-the-union address on Wednesday January 27th. A recent defeat of the Democratic candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat once held by Edward Kennedy has given the Republicans enough votes to break the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the upper house. This [...]
For Obama, a mandate to be moderate
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Churchill’s wife said that his being turned out of office by British voters in July 1945 — the war in the Pacific still raged, and he was participating in the Potsdam conference — might be a blessing in disguise. He replied: It is very well disguised. Barack Obama might not see the silver lining on [...]
The Keypad Solution
Posted in On Language, tagged January 24 2010 on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
There is a long and noble history of trying to change the English language’s notoriously illogical system of spelling. The fact that through, rough, dough, plough, hiccough and trough all end with -ough, yet none of them sound the same as any of the others, is the sort of thing that has been vexing poets [...]
My So-Called Wife
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she’s living with — first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner. It’s an increasingly common situation, according to a recent Pew study that found that the proportion of American marriages in [...]
After the Massachusetts Massacre
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the [...]
The Legacy of Baker Street
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on January 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Eventually, time will have its way with Sherlock Holmes, and he will pass fully into the public domain. In America, that bow to posterity will come sometime in 2023. Until then, Holmes is privately owned, and the subject of an uncongenial dispute among the descendants of Arthur Conan Doyle over who controls the rights to [...]
Ruth Padel’s top 10 women poets
Posted in Literature on January 23, 2010 | Comments Off
In honour of International Women’s Day, Ruth Padel, prizewinning poet and former chair of the UK Poetry Society, chooses her favourite poets who happen to be women. “These are poets whose work I need, treasure, and keep learning from.” 1. Sappho She is in fragments but still astonishing. Just look at her beautiful language, her [...]
Richard Gwyn’s top 10 books in which things end badly
Posted in Literature on January 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Richard Gwyn’s second novel, Deep Hanging Out (Snowbooks), is set in Crete in 1981 against the backdrop of the cold war, and incorporates the myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. His first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (Parthian), was a surprise hit of 2005 and was described as the ‘best novel [...]
Elise Valmorbida’s top 10 books with a happy ending
Posted in Literature on January 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Elise Valmorbida grew up Italian in Australia, but fell in love with London. Her critically acclaimed novel Matilde Waltzing was nominated for two national literary awards and her short stories have been published widely. She runs a communications consultancy and teaches creative writing at Central St Martin’s. Her latest work, The Book of Happy Endings, [...]
