Literary Fiction Review

I’ve been sitting on this review for a few days now because I felt that once I wrote, it, I would be forced to leave the book behind and move on to another project. I didn’t want to do that. While others have seen fit to compare Ms. Lee’s debut novel The Piano Teacher to The English Patient, I found much more Fitzgerald in Ms. Lee’s tale than I did Ondaatje. This is a seduction of sorts, an homage to Hong Kong and its effect on the myriad expatriates who land there. The trappings surrounding such a composition make for a good, well-told story, but the city remains the star. (more…)

Something I rarely do is read other reviews before writing my own. But with this book, I honestly felt as if I had little choice. And, before I begin, I should say that the reviews I read were ALL favorable. My voice, though, is not raised in praise; to the contrary, I want to shout out to everyone who might be willing to listen, that I found Never Tell a Lie, by Hallie Ephron, to be a perfect example of the formulaic fiction one finds in most of today’s media—as the title suggests, I’ll never tell a lie! (more…)

A Mind at Peace is a movingly haunting symphony. Set to a backdrop of age-old Ottoman music and verse, it is the story of a country’s struggle to hold onto meaning and philosophic insight gained from centuries of traditions and customs while careening toward the comfort of wealth through acceptance of modern Western economic culture. In just three generations, Turkish peasants were expected to complete this process of acculturation.

“The past is always nipping at our heels. A surplus of half-dead worldviews lie in wait to interfere in modern life. On the other hand our engagement with the modern and the West amounts to emptying into that gushing river as an afterthought. Meanwhile, we’re not simply water, we’re human society, and we’re not a tributary joining a river, we’re appropriating a civilization along with its culture, within which we must possess a particular identity.” (more…)

Back in September, I made note of the fact that good, old Barney Rosset was to be honored at the National Book Awards ceremony. He was, and now there’s a fantastic article on him in Newsweek. It’s long, and well wroth the read.

This week the publishing industry has been rocked by HMH laying off more staff, Random’s restructuring, and Penguin’s announcement of salary freezes for those earning over $50,000. But I looked outside this morning, and the truth is that the sky is not falling. In fact, I’m beginning to believe the days are dawning more brightly. (more…)

Here we go! Sony has revealed that it has sold 300,000 of its digital e-book Reader globally since the device was launched in October 2006 and that it is working on a wireless version of the product to rival Amazon.com’s Kindle. Sony’s unit retails for $300, which, in my opinion, is still too high, but the move toward wireless should also begin the price wars. (more…)

Last week a Publisher’s Weekly report that Harcourt Houghton Mifflin (HMH) had put a freeze on acquiring new books sent a tremor through the book world. But as the matter has begun to shake out, it seems the report was a bit overblown—or, at least that’s what is being heard from the folks at HMH. (more…)

Late yesterday, TechCrunch reported the following:

Update on the Kindle 2: It was scheduled to be released in October in time for this holiday season, but Bezos himself reportedly pulled the plug for last minute changes to the software. Our sources now say it’s tentatively scheduled to go on sale in “early next quarter.”

The images that surfaced of the new Kindle in October are real - it’s a longer device but not as thick as the original Kindle, and fixes some of the button issues that plague users (like accidental page turns). A larger-screen student version is still scheduled for the first half of 2009.

Amazon is slow to turn new versions of the Kindle, which isn’t surprising given that this is their first foray into actual devices. I still think they’d be better off licensing the platform and letting the factories in China iterate more often on the Kindle - from what we hear a bunch of new ebook products are about to hit the market, and some of them may be real competition to Amazon.

Defining the Novel in Northanger Abbey, Ms. Austen said:

A work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest deliniation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Sounds like a novel might be the perfect Christmas gift!

I picked this up from Publisher’s Weekly this morning:

“Marcella Edwards at PFD has secured a new deal for William Trevor in the UK and the US. Rights for a new novel and a long-awaited collection of stories from one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers have been sold to Tony Lacey at Penguin UK and to Kathryn Court at Viking Penguin, US (brokered by Peter Matson at SLL).

“Love and Summer is Trevor’s first novel since The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. It will be published by Penguin in August 2009 and will be followed by The Collected Stories for Christmas 2009.

“Tony Lacey at Penguin said: “It’s been six years since William Trevor’s last, magnificent, novel, The Story of Gault, but the wait has been worth it. Love and Summer is a wonderfully observed and deeply compassionate novel about a sudden and secret love affair in a small Irish town during one long summer. One feels that only William Trevor could have written it.”

“A new novel from William Trevor is always an event,” said Edwards.”

I couldn’t agree more! We’ll be reading the advance on this one for sure. Look for our review next summer.