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What To Read Awards: Lev Grossman

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:55:00 +0000

Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time magazine.

Lev's top 10:

1. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
2. “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel
3. “My Friend Dahmer” by Derf Backderf
4. “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling
5. “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” by Ben Fountain
6. “At Last” by Edward St. Aubyn
7. “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There” by Catherynne Valente
8. “Are You My Mother?” by Alison Bechdel
9. “Building Stories” by Chris Ware
10. “Code Name Verity” by Elizabeth Wein

Man, oh manifesto!

Thu, 02 Nov 2000 08:47:00 +0000

Old "Doonesbury" cartoon. Bernie (the chemistry geek) comes up with a magic formula that whisks Mike back in time to his favorite historical literary milieu: a cafe on the French Riviera of the '20s. Dos Passos, the Fitzgeralds, Valentino. The punch line is that Fitzgerald sticks Mike with the tab, but what it makes me think of is the fact that nobody in the future, given the opportunity, would ever want themselves whisked back to our particular moment in literary history.

Literature has hit a dull patch. You'd think the turn of the millennium would have lit a fire under us, prompting a slew of gorgeously decadent works of louche brilliance -- but no. Literary fiction would be in crisis if we only had the energy to manage a proper crisis. Either it has lost the ability to excite us or we've lost the ability to be excited by it, either of which pretty much comes to the same thing, and all of which accounts for the sense of relief I felt when I heard that there was a literary manifesto afoot.

A bunch of young English writers, led by the novelists Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe (whose name sounds like it should belong to a scary clown), have banded together under the name the New Puritans and produced both a manifesto and an anthology of short stories to back it up.

The gay Nabokov

Wed, 17 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

In 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Nabokov and his four siblings posed for a photograph as a present for their mother. The children were in Yalta, in exile from their native St. Petersburg. In the photo, the air of the fabulous wealth and privilege they grew up in still clings to them. The girls are wearing matching sailor suits. Little Elena, Vladimir's younger sister, holds a patient pet dachshund in her lap.

In the background looms a serious and rather beautiful young man dressed entirely in black. His intense gaze meets the camera's through an exquisite pince-nez. He is not Vladimir, who is wearing a bow tie and looking hilariously full of himself. He is Sergei Nabokov, born 11 months after his famous brother and with a very different fate ahead of him.

Vladimir Nabokov, of course, would go on to become one of the most important writers of the 20th century, earning not only critical acclaim but international fame and financial success as well. Sergei would never be famous -- in fact, his existence has been all but covered up by his family -- but in its own way his life would be just as remarkable. Shy, awkward and foppish, the opposite of his gregarious brother, Sergei had a secret: He was gay.

Terrors of the Amazon

Tue, 02 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

When my first novel, "Warp," was published in late 1997, I was hungry for feedback: reviews, e-mail, sales figures, whatever objective confirmation I could get that I was in fact finally a published author. Like a fetishist in a shoe store, I fondled copies of my own book in Barnes & Noble. Following the example of Michael Chabon's "Wonder Boys," I even listed my e-mail address on the cover. And I fell into the habit of obsessively checking and rechecking the page on which my book is listed on Amazon.com.

Why? Because although to the average surfer the pages of Amazon.com are just so much browser-window dressing, for an attention-starved author they are tiny peepholes through which a writer can eavesdrop, voyeuristically, on his or her book as it interacts with the real world. And that has some serious consequences. It's turning Amazon into a powerful force, a force that's changing the very structure of literary culture as we know it -- a force, dear reader, that made me do terrible, terrible things.