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3 weeks ago | 
thetimes.com | John Self
Who is the greatest living American writer? If one measure is sheer quality control — all brilliant books, no bad books — then one contender must be Tobias Wolff, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month. In the 1980s when he started out Wolff was associated with his friends Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, but for my money he’s better than either. Wolff’s output is small but perfect: one novel, one novella, two memoirs, four collections of stories.
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3 weeks ago | 
observer.co.uk | John Self
A trio of Elmore Leonard crime novels show that, for all his concision and aptitude for depicting violence, the magic of his prose lies in wit and charm No hooptedoodle. That was the essence of crime writer Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing. Hooptedoodle – he took the term from John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday – was the stuff that gets in the way of the story and that the reader tends to skip. Descriptive passages, paragraphs of weather, prologues.
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | John Self
The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer (Swift, £14.99) This clever and vivid book by a historian of Vichy France falls somewhere between autobiographical novel and fictionalised memoir. It opens as a colourful story based on the author’s family: her grandmother’s morphine addiction, her aunt Zizi’s vanity (she “boasted that all she kept in her refrigerator were beauty products”), and her mother’s reluctance to talk about the past.
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1 month ago | 
thetimes.com | John Self
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1 month ago | 
thetimes.com | John Self
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1 month ago | 
observer.co.uk | John Self
A complex yet rewarding dual narrative of a man fleeing war and a woman coming to terms with her mathematician father’s legacy Mathias Énard’s new novel presents itself as a book of contrasts: two stories, apparently unrelated, unspool in alternating chapters. However, “unspool” might not be the right word, as only one of the narratives takes a direct route to its destination.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | John Self
‘Human beings and their basic nature are the same everywhere,” Banu Mushtaq says. “That is the intention of my writing. The theme is woman, the theme is marginalised people, the theme is to be a voice to the voiceless community.”Mushtaq, from the Karnataka region of southern India, has been “awake all night”, she says, as we speak on the morning after she won the International Booker prize in London for her book Heart Lamp.
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1 month ago | 
msn.com | John Self
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | John Self
What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses.
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1 month ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | John Self
This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Ben Markovits is something of an enigma — to me, at least. The British-American novelist has been productive if not downright prolific, publishing 11 novels since his debut 21 years ago, and in 2013 was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
