Looking at On The Origin of Species

The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has begun a series where the Toronto-based paper has asked a number of noted authors to comment on the 50 Greatest Books. This week, Michael Ruse discusses one of the most important books both in the history of science but also in the history of ideas - Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. To read more visit the article here.

Salon's Best for 2007

The book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, but other depressing problems came to the fore.. The US National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four Americans had not read a single book in the preceding year. For the other three, 2007 did provide some gems however. Here is Salon's list of it best of 2007 or at least its review of the most pleasurable titles of the year.

Rediscovering Science Fiction

In the 1970s, Kingsley Amis, Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss were judging a contest for the best science-fiction novel of the year. They were going to give the prize to Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s first novel. At the last minute, however, the publishers withdrew the book from the award. They didn’t want Grimus on the SF shelves. “Had it won,” Aldiss, the wry, 82-year-old godfather of British SF, observes, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again. In this week's Times Online, Brian Appleyard examines our snobbishness toward Sci Fi and discovers that Science Fiction might just be the best forum to communicate complex ideas. For the full article go here.

Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007

Norman Mailer died Saturday at the age of 84. A co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, Mailer was controversial, iconoclastic, acerbic and as famous for his personal life as for his novels and essays.
Considered one of the greatest writers of his generation, he has also been characterized as an egotist and misogynist who never lived up to the potential he showed in his debut novel — The Naked and the Dead. For a review of his tumultuous life and work read here.

Man Booker Prize Winner Announced

This week's London Times reviews the winners of this year's Man Booker Prize. "Too many reviewers adopt a reverential tone for books that barely deserve a review, let alone recommendation, the chairman of the 2007 Man Booker Prize said last night," reports Dalya Alberge. "Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, used last night’s awards ceremony as a platform to mount the attack on the art of book reviewing before announcing that Anne Enright had won this year’s £50,000 award for her novel The Gathering. Enright, 45, a little-known Irish author who began her career as a television producer, was considered the rank outsider but she saw off competition from the two favourites, Ian McEwan, for On Chesil Beach, and Lloyd Jones, for Mister Pip, as well as the other outsiders, Nicola Barker, Moshin Hamid and Indra Sinha.She won for The Gathering, her fourth novel, a bleak story of a dysfunctional Irish family."  Read the full story here.

Dead White Females

Can you remember the last time you curled up under the covers with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? Have you ever had a snuggle session with a seven-volume, 3200-page tome about human consciousness? Well thanks to the efforts of literary critics, core-curriculum revisionists, feminists, and post-modernists who’ve fought long and hard to effectively block mid-level Dead White Male authors from dominating traditional pedagogy few have. Because, for every dozen Dead White Male authors there’s one quietly powerful Dead White Female author taking a meeting — and running Hollywood with a dainty iron fist. In this article by Sharon Steel in The Phoenix we find out how dead white females are having a profound effect on modern pop culture. Read the full article here.