Summer Book Suggestions

Nick Hornby, Judy Blume, and more weigh in

(NEWSER) - What was the best book of the year? Salon asked Nick Hornby, Junot Diaz, Curtis Sittenfeld, and other people with better literary credentials than ours what they enjoyed in 2009. Their responses are in the photo gallery. More»

Author shifts gears, has fun with a stoner detective in the '60s

(NEWSER) - Thomas Pynchon's back with what appears to be his most accessible novel yet, in the unlikely category of detective fiction. Critics reviewing Inherent Vice say he pulled it off:

• Laura Miller, Salon: It's "a sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of The Big Lebowski." The minimal structure and the genre itself provide "ample cover for Pynchon's literary weaknesses."
• Andy Martin, Independent: "Sun-kissed, psychedelic, and sexually enhanced, Pynchon has re-embodied, re-grooved the soul of the '60s."

It's fizzy, too—and comes complete with recipes and regrets

(NEWSER) - Recipes for "Morning After Pumpkin Bread" and "Ineffectual Eggplant Parmigiana" should clue readers in that Giulia Melucci's I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti is no how-to on gaining a man's heart through his stomach, Joyce Wadler writes for the New York Times. Melucci—"a former publishing publicist who is hilarious, good-looking, and as restrained as Joan Rivers on crack"—recounts her checkered love life in a style Wadler dubs "Sex and the City with recipes." More»

One-star reviews offer relief from literary anxiety

(NEWSER) - Anne Enright's The Gathering won the prestigious Booker Prize and dozens of adulatory reviews, but Cynthia Crossen of the Wall Street Journal didn't find much to admire in the bleak story of a dysfunctional family. Luckily, there's a place to vent such disappointment, she writes: amid Amazon's readers' reviews, where best-sellers and classics alike come in for bitter complaint and bad-mannered invective. More»

Author of Blindness deals with death in new novel

(NEWSER) - The premise of Jose Saramago’s Death With Interruptions seems a bit cutesy at first, with a Buffy-esque Grim Reaper deciding to take some time off her job, writes Shannon McBeen in Radar. But as Saramago explores the ramifications of universal immortality, he manages to transform “the admittedly weak premise into a wry, smart, absurd, original novel” by dint of sheer “effing good writing.” More»