Adventure sailor Thor Heyerdahl’s audacious attempt to voyage across the Pacific using a rudimentary raft is a great human achievement. The book in question chronicles his jaw-dropping journey from Peru to the Polynesian islands on the hand-made balsa wood raft with only natural accessories at disposal. The stupendous success of the book is as much…
Tag: Books
Nicholson Baker: Biography & Books
BAKER, Nicholson (born 1957) US writer The minutiae of life, the tiny details that form the background to most fiction, are brought into the foreground in the early novels of Nicholson Baker. Little happens in a conventional narrative sense but the reader’s interest is held by Baker’s playfulness with language, his odd, oblique observations and…
Beryl Bainbridge: Biography & Books
BAINBRIDGE, Beryl (born 1934) British novelist In British music-hall and stand-up comedy, there is a tradition of using flat, unemotional words to recount the disasters that happen to perfectly ordinary people, whose boring lives conceal passions and aspirations the speaker can only hint at. Bainbridge’s short, dialogue-filled novels do the same thing in print. They…
15 Best Autobiography Books
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Writing an autobiography gives you the chance to relive your own life – and to edit it to suit yourself. Although we readers may think that an autobiography allows us inside the writer’s head, this is an illusion. We see only what we are allowed to see, and who is to tell how much…
Paul Auster: Biography & Books
AUSTER, Paul (born 1947) US writer Auster’s first book, Squeeze Play (1982), was a pastiche of a crime novel and his key work, The New York Trilogy (1987, although the individual books appeared separately in 1985 and 1986 as City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room), is also a sly deconstruction job on the…
Jane Austen: Biography & Books
AUSTEN, Jane (1775–1817) British novelist Austen loved the theatre, and the nearest equivalents to her novels, for pace and verve, are the social comedies of such writers as Sheridan or Goldsmith. The kind of novels popular at the time were epic panoramas (like those of Sir Walter Scott), showing the human race strutting and swaggering…
Margaret Atwood: Biography & Books
ATWOOD, Margaret (born 1939) Canadian writer of novels, short stories and poems Atwood is a poet as well as a novelist, and her gifts of precise observation and exact description illuminate all her work. She is fascinated by the balance of power between person and person, and by the way our apparently coherent actions and…
Isaac Asimov: Biography & Books
ASIMOV, Isaac (1920–92) US writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction Asimov published his first story at nineteen, and went on to write over 300 books, ranging from Bible guides and history textbooks to the science fiction novels and stories for which he is best known. Much of his most seminal science fiction work was…
Martin Amis: Biography & Books
AMIS, Martin (born 1949) British novelist The novels of Amis fils are icily satirical, cold with rage at the physical and moral sleaziness of the human race. His characters’ preoccupations are sex, drugs, money and success, and they are tormented by failure to win, or keep, all four. Ronald Firbank and F. Scott Fitzgerald found…
Kingsley Amis: Biography & Books
AMIS, Kingsley (1922–95) British writer of novels, poems and non-fiction In the 1950s, when Amis’s writing career began, British writers of all kinds – the ‘angry young men’ – had begun to rant in plays, films and novels about the unfairness, snobbishness and priggishness of life. Whingeing became an artistic form – and Amis’s novels…