Book Reviews

Do you fancy yourself as an edgy literary type? Have you got a thing for Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn Monroe by Norman Mailer and Bert Stern, could be the Christmas present for you. The handsome photo-book is a combination of Mailer’s cool prose and some of the most ‘revealing, intimate’ shots of Marilyn ever taken. (Revealing and intimate, in this context, means Monroe’s nipples can be seen.) All this at a time when Marilyn chic is back, what with the new biopic starring Michelle Williams. What’s not to like? Well, there’s the outrageous price: $1000 (about 650 quid).  And as Natasha Vargas-Cooper over at Book Forum puts it, ‘Divorced from the

What to do if you want to write a novel, but can’t find a plot (in the broadest sense of the term) around which to frame your ideas? Give up, is Margaret Atwood’s stark advice. There is no formula, she says, no easy answer to writing fiction. Most people have a creative spark, but not everyone has the intellect to discipline it. You either have it or you don’t. So much for the truism that everyone has at least one novel in them.

Amanda Craig tells us what she would title her memoirs, which book reduces her to tears and the 19th century literary heart throb her husband most looks like.  1) What are you reading at the moment? I always read several books at once, so it’s Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis biography (review), Julia Jones’s A Ravelled Flag (children’s review), Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (fun) and Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate (fun.) 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Almost everything, because if a book isn’t worth reading under the covers it isn’t worth reading at all. The kind of book people read in

As part of our book of the month coverage, here is Nicholas Lezard’s review of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, taken from the current issue of the Spectator. You can read other posts on the book here. So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence beyond Sherlock Holmes’s word, and if you look at Holmes’s behaviour in ‘The Final Problem’ you can see an almost classic case of paranoia — brought on, no doubt, by a heavy cocaine binge. Michael Dibdin, in his The Last Sherlock Holmes

It’s that time of the year again: prepare for bad sex, courtesy of the Literary Review. The Bad Sex Awards will be held, wait for it, at the In and Out Club on 6 December. The list is still open, and readers can still nominate worthy candidate by contacting the Literary Review. At present, though, 12 authors from around the world will compete for the prize. Some luminaries who ought to have known better are among the condemned. Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 has been included, as has Stephen King’s 11.22.63. The Guardian has reproduced this excruciating passage from King’s book: ‘”She said, “Don’t make me wait, I’ve had enough of that,”

Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period of inventiveness to the later years of solemnity. More importantly, however, it fleshes out a career many will only know through Reid’s recent work.    The early poems are an acquired taste. The reader can feel, in the words of a later poem, as if they are “in a land / whose language I do not understand / but from which I could bring back / some wisdom, some purloined knack” (‘Insofar’). Personally, I’m a sucker for its trippy, psychedelic