Last year, I wrote a piece here called “The Future of Literary Fiction” , which included a list of authors that I regularly search for at Amazon.com for their upcoming novels or short story collections. In essence, it’s a personal version, exclusive of age or nationality, of other recent attempts to list the best writers of fiction. I referenced the list of authors in the 1999 “Future of American Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, which has held up extremely well. Now, TNY has published a new list of “20 under 40″, which doesn’t pretend to be a “best of” list as much as a grouping of representative voices for our current culture. This has generated a number of alternate lists, including this one at The Guardian of British authors and this tiresome and nearly incoherent screed by Lee Siegel in The Observer informing us that fiction is dead. Nonsense. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Portnoy’s Complaint was my first time. I read it when I was 17 and I can still remember the outlaw sensation. This was a best-seller? This was literary fiction! Wow!

Today, this famous/infamous book is still as funny, obscene, and obscenely funny as any book I’ve ever read. Terry Southern, in his Blue Movie, could only ape Roth’s tropes, but not his savage energy or laughoutloud uproariousness. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian who left his country as a young man before the war tore his country apart. In Chicago, he learned his craft as a writer, in English, and now sees his stories regularly printed in the New Yorker magazine. His fine second volume of short stories, Love and Obstacles, contains eight linked meditations on sex, love, war, writing, and dispossession. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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I know, I know. But, a.) I’m on vacation, so I needed something I could write about off the top of my head and briefly, and, b.) while you may have read it, you’d be surprised how many people, particularly young people brought up on the LOTR movies, have not read Tolkien’s masterpiece.   [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Now read this! is taking a brief vacation, because I am! Last week I wrote about my favorite novel of all time. Now it’s your turn. Leave a brief comment about your favorite novel of all time and we’ll see if any of us agree. Until next week!

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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My list of the top five novels of all time changes from time to time. Currently it is:

1. Anna Karenina, 2. Lolita, 3. Sabbath’s Theatre, 4. Cousin Bette, 5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

Numbers two through five will likely change or change in order, but Tolstoy’s novel of adultery in 19th century Russia has been at the top since I first read it twenty-five years ago. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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I first read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his Lectures on Literature said, “Mansfield Park is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.” [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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I dislike the term “genre fiction.” It’s pejorative, and is used to make a value judgment on works of art for their content, rather than their execution. There’s a reason why we don’t think of Poe as a genre writer of horror or detective fiction. Though others might disagree, I don’t think of Tolkein’s “Trilogy” (when I was a teenager we referred to it only as the “the Trilogy” and never as The Lord of the Rings) as fantasy genre fiction or Stanislav Lem’s Solaris as science fiction genre fiction, or Stephen King’s The Shining as horror genre fiction. Now, there is some value in having a term to differentiate between works of high quality and works written less well and according to a formula, but “genre fiction” seems ill suited to that. “Pulp fiction” (shorn of its Tarantinoness) would perhaps be more helpful.

A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, published 70 years ago, is neither genre nor pulp, but one of the most original and influential novels about space and monsters ever written. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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I won’t often devote this column to poetry. Since much of the best poetry is written in shorter forms, it doesn’t really fall within the scope of a “great books” column. (Though, even as I write this, it occurs to me that I may have to write about handfuls of poems by Stevens, Wilbur, and others, someday.) But, I could not long put off writing about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for me the best long poem of the English language of the 20th century. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Okay, okay. You’ve read The Great Gatsby. We’ve all read The Great Gatsby. You were assigned it in 8th grade, then in high school, and again in Freshman English in college (though your subsequent readings were the Cliff’s Notes!). And you still have that crushed paperback with the cheesy neon lights on the cover. You forgot all about it until you saw the movie on TV, and when Mia Farrow went orgasmic over Robert Redford’s tailored pink shirts, you thought, “Well, that’s enough of that!” (And you didn’t even know, thank God, about a remake with Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens!)

Well, forget all that. You’re a grown-up now and you need to read Gatsby with a grown-up’s perspective. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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