My wilderness year
Having three novels published over a space of about eight months is an invigorating, magnificent and mystifying experience. The New York Times name-checks your Annihilation on their front page as an example of “binge reading” and after the glow fades (and the confusion: please don’t skim) you realize it’s also binge publicity, which means binge...
Jhumpa Lahiri: ‘The Third and Final Continent’
Jhumpa Lahiri published her debut collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999 – a year after I moved to America from Russia. I remember seeing stacks of that book, with the now iconic orange-yellow jacket, in the Barnes & Noble of Anchorage, Alaska, where I spent a lot of my after-school time...
Yiyun Li’s multiple moments
Yiyun Li’s latest novel was inspired by a real-life poisoning case in China in 1995, in which a 19-year-old student was paralysed and severely disabled, but did not die. The culprit was never discovered, but suspicion still falls on a roommate from a well-connected family who subsequently fled to America. The slow poisoning in Kinder...
Rumi at the top
Susan Minot’s latest novel, Thirty Girls, is a gripping story about an American writer who travels to Uganda to report on the abduction and detention of a group of schoolgirls by the rebel army of a local warlord, whose life becomes inescapably entwined with that of one of the girls. She disappears when she writes,...
The old world
No one wants to listen to a man lament his solitary nights – myself included. Which is why, on an early fall morning four months after Gail left, when a woman breezed into my shop with a pinstriped skirt in her arms and said, “On what day this can be ready?” I didn’t write a...
Unknown knowns
When I began writing my story collection The UnAmericans I was blissfully ignorant of all things publishing-related. I’d never considered the difference between a commercial or independent press, or publishing stories in magazines versus small journals – reading was, at that time in my life, a completely personal and haphazard experience. I’d wander into a...
Hardy perennials
My novel Winter describes a domestic crisis in the life of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is among the greatest of English writers, famous not only for novels like Far From The Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles but also for many beautiful and haunting poems. He was a fascinating and complex man, full of paradoxes....
Between Nabokov and Fleming
Read more and buy the book David Gilbert’s archly entertaining and insightful novel & Sons, about a once-lauded novelist reaching out to his estranged family, was published in the US to rave reviews that variously compared his storytelling, mastery of language and observational skills to Dostoyevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Proust and Nabokov. As the book...
An affectionate regard
One of the old roads leaving a well-known county town in the west of England climbs a long slope and finally reaches a kind of open plain, a windy spot from which a wide prospect of the countryside is available. Fields of corn occupy the near and middle distance, while the rolling downs further off...
Amy Tan among the courtesans
Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, is a sweeping saga spanning fifty years and two continents, at its heart examining the inner workings of Shanghai’s courtesan houses in the aftermath of the collapse of China’s imperial dynasty when the New Republic opened the gates to international trade – and universal chicanery. In territory...
Frédéric Beigbeder: A life in fiction
Frédéric Beigbeder’s fictionalised biography A French Novel is a meditation on family, memory, the writing process and criminal justice. Sparked by his arrest and confinement in 2008 for snorting cocaine from a car bonnet outside a Paris nightclub, it’s an engaging reflection on an advantaged but fragmented life on the Basque coast and in the...
