Reviews

So Bright and Delicate, By John Keats (Rated 5/ 5 )

Following the opening earlier this month of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Penguin has clearly decided to target young, love-sick girls, which inevitably means lots of flowers on the cover of this collection of letters and poems from Keats to his neighbour. Yet I'm not sure those girls will find what they're looking for in this book: the bulk is about the misery and pain of the reality of love, not its joys.

Inside Reviews

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, By Shirley Jackson (Rated 5/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Shirley Jackson's brilliant kind of American Gothic is offered up for our consumption in this, her final novel, first published in 1962. She liked to mix the gothic and the domestic and much of her writing centred on houses; a reflection, perhaps, of how the domestic sphere impinged on women's lives after the Second World War.

A Dead Hand, By Paul Theroux

Sunday, 15 November 2009

A psychoanalyst would have a field day with this book. In A Dead Hand, the veteran US travel writer Paul Theroux has created a literary crime novel of sorts set in Calcutta, told through the eyes of a veteran American travel writer, Jerry Delfont. Delfont is suffering writer's block (the novel's title is another phrase for the condition), and fears that he's washed up creatively, spiritually and emotionally.

Under the Dome, By Stephen King

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Stephen King's latest is darkly humorous, but did 'The Simpsons' beat him to the punchline?

The Dawn of Green, By Harriet Ritvo

Sunday, 15 November 2009

The battle lines between environmentalism and industry were drawn in 19th-century Manchester

An Education, By Lynn Barber (Rated 3/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

When the journalist Lynn Barber was a 16-year-old in 1960, for some inexplicable reason she got into the car of a smooth-talking older man she'd never met before.

Legend of a Suicide, By David Vann

Sunday, 15 November 2009

The ghost of Hemingway stalks this haunting story

Obama Music, By Bonnie Greer (Rated 3/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Bonnie Greer is a "south-sider" from Chicago, where Barack Obama made his political home – and, she says, coming from the south side means keeping it real, not forgetting your roots, and carrying blues music in your soul.

Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S Thompson, By William McKeen (Rated 4/ 5 )

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Biography shows how much a subject was essentially a product of his or her times. Some subjects react against their times, some attempt to step out of them altogether. Hunter S Thompson was mired deep in his. Almost a clich� from the counterculture of the 1960s, he embraced it all: sexist attitudes to women, experiments with drugs, time in prison... oh, and revolutionising an art form.

The United States of McSweeney's, ed Nick Hornby & Eli Horowitz

Sunday, 15 November 2009

These are serious, grown-up stories – honest

The Humbling, By Philip Roth

Sunday, 15 November 2009

An actor, famous and fêted, at the peak of his career, steps on stage one night. Starting to speak, he finds that he simply can't do it any longer. He feels fake, inauthentic, unprepared, and, though he goes through the motions, it becomes apparent that his audience has perceived a change in him, too, and not one for the better. His gift, whatever it was, has gone. How does a life continue when the talent it rested on is abruptly removed?

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