Lisa Tuttle, a novelist and science fiction and fantasy reviewer for the Times (London), named her top six vampire books.Carmilla by J.S. LeFanuRead about the other five books on Tuttle's list.
Early Victorian female vampire: she kissed a girl and she liked it.
Meryl Gordon, author of Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach, compiled a list of the five best "chronicles of high society" for the Wall Street Journal.Frankie's Place
by Jim Sterba
Grove, 2003
In 1982, when New York Times reporter Jim Sterba (now with The Wall Street Journal) fell for journalist Frances FitzGerald, he was initiallyRead about all five books on Gordon's list.daunted by her patrician New England background. Sterba was the product of a lonely childhood on a Michigan farm; she was the daughter of the swashbuckling deputy director of the CIA, Desmond FitzGerald, and the socially connected Marietta Peabody. Frankie, as Frances was known, had always summered at Northeast Harbor, an elite retreat in Maine (though the "Frankie's place" of the title is a decidedly non-luxurious uninsulated cabin). Reporting with wit and affection his experiences as a new spouse adjusting to this privileged patch of Maine, Sterba paints a memorable portrait of the village's local characters but also of the vacationing aristocracy, whose number included Brooke Astor.
One book on his list:Heart of Darkness by Joseph ConradRead about all six books on Maher's list.
My all-time favorite, even before Francis Ford Coppola turned it into Apocalypse Now. The ultimate topic, the ultimate metaphor. What great book couldn’t have been called Heart of Darkness?
George Brock, International Editor of the Times (London), named six favorite books about the media.My Trade by Andrew MarrRead about the other five books on Brock's chart.
Affectionate romp around political journalism and its history.
Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan (Viking) 320 pagesRead about every title to make January Magazine's list of the best books of 2008.A teenage girl goes missing. Search parties are formed. Pale-faced parents speak to television cameras in quavering voices. Rewards are offered, flyers are taped to store windows, hopes rise and fall. By now, we’re sadly all too familiar with the unique cadence of events that follow an abduction. Most of us can pinpoint the exact moment when our optimistic faith turns to grim certainty the victim is not only missing, but murdered. In one of the best novels of his varied career, Stewart O’Nan charts the case of one family whose college-bound daughter vanishes into thin air while driving to work in a small Ohio town. With an almost forensic efficiency, O’Nan examines the effect of the mystery on the family, friends and the entire town. What happened to 18-year-old Kim Larsen is less important than how her parents and sister deal with the emotional aftershocks. -- David Abrams
One title on his list:Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, by Lee IsraelRead about the other collections to make the list.
The title comes from a note a contrite Dorothy Parker banged out in the early 1960s, except that it doesn't. The title comes from a Dorothy Parker note counterfeited by the rather unrepentant Lee Israel in the early 1990s. Once a best-selling biographer, Israel had slid headlong into hard times — food stamps, liquid lunches — when a chance discovery in a research library sparked a criminal epiphany. Over roughly 15 months, she painstakingly forged 400 letters "by" famous authors and showbiz notables, paying her Manhattan rent by selling them to autograph dealers. A writer with the talent to fake the voices of Noel Coward and Lillian Hellman is a real writer, and Israel's slender self-portrait as a literary low-life — a woman with vintage typewriters stacked in a mildewed storage locker, with a jug of scotch at her mouth after the FBI finally comes calling — is an absorbing hybrid of barstool yarn and brisk thriller.
Number One on his list:Nineteen Eighty-FourRead about all five books on Johnson's list.
By George Orwell
Harcourt, Brace, 1949
It is easier to say when the Cold War ended than when it began. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union happened within two action-packed years, 1989-1991. But the ideological conflict between the Soviets and the West started immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, well before the post-World War II battle for geopolitical supremacy. George Orwell seems to have coined the phrase "cold war" in 1945, in a newspaper article written while he was at work on "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the novel that defined the era more than any other. Rereading it today, one is struck by how prescient Orwell was in his evocation of a dictatorship under which truth and morality have been turned into "thoughtcrime." For Orwell, and for Winston Smith, the beleaguered central character of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," "freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." The Cold War was won by insisting that the values of Western civilization were non-negotiable. Is that still our position today?
THE WHITE TIGERRead about all the books on the Journal's list.Aravind Adiga
Naturalism, this ain't. Nor is it some schoolboy's tale out of Rudyard Kipling. This comic novel was the winner of the 2008 prestigious Man Booker Prize, more often than not awarded to the most audacious literary work out of the old British Empire (former colonials not merely included but encouraged).
Told in the form of confessional letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, "The White Tiger" fairly reeks with claims to show the "real" and decidedly unspiritual India; the self-proclaimed tiger of the title is meant to symbolize the hard-charging and morally unhinged predators driving India's technology boom. (He writes to Mr. Wen because he's about to visit India to examine its high-tech industry.)
Of course, it's brought to you by a graduate of Columbia and Oxford who left India for Australia as a teenager (now 34, he's since moved back).What could be more real than that these days? The prose of the former Time magazine reporter is disciplined and vivid, though hardly up to the gushing poetics of a Salman Rushdie. Still, Aravind Adiga's caustic eye may be just what's needed to capture the cutthroat development of Bangalore and Gurgaon, at least until a local Dickens comes along. And his is one "tiger" worth sighting.
Trigger City by Sean Chercover (Morrow) 304 pagesRead about every title to make the list.“Facts are not truth. Listen carefully. This is important.” These are the first words to come from private eye Ray Dudgeon since he finished his first adventure, in Sean Chercover’s debut novel, Big City, Bad Blood (2007). In Trigger City, Ray’s still smarting as a result of his clash with The Outfit, losing his girlfriend and being tortured. Business isn’t going well, either. So when the late Joan Richmond’s father offers all the money Ray needs for exclusive use of his services, Ray can’t say no. There’s no question about who killed Joan Richmond; a former coworker rang her doorbell, shot her in the face, then went home and committed suicide to The Best of Abba. But things get hairy when Ray’s usual allies, Chicago police Lieutenant Mike Angelo and reporter Terry Green, are scared away from this case. Things become even more bizarre when Ray finds himself caught between two government organizations straight out of a Duane Swierczynski novel. Chercover achieved amazing results with a stock premise in Big City. He does even better with Trigger City, writing more tightly and never letting up on the pace. A pale copy of his first novel would have been an achievement in and of itself. Chercover goes far beyond that with his sophomore work, telling a good story better than most writes could do. -- Jim Winter
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere by John McFetridge (Harcourt) 304 pagesRead about the other titles on the list.Set in Toronto, John McFetridge’s sophomore offering (after Dirty Sweet) features an ensemble cast from both sides of the law, most of them spokes radiating out from Sharon, a single mother operating a low-level dope-growing operation. Gangs of Italians, South Asians and Angels, all grafting for a heavier slice of Toronto’s new prosperity; a Native American cop and his recently widowed partner investigating an apparent suicide while sitting on the powder keg of an internal affairs probe about to blow the Toronto force apart; Ray, a new face on the scene with an offer Sharon can’t refuse; Richard, the old flame now a power broker in the world of Canadian crime. A multi-character narrative, this story unfolds with a brevity, fluidity and power that is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard’s writing, in that it’s almost an abbreviation of style. One of its chief delights, however, is that McFetridge appears to be working on a more epic scale -- Toronto is here a microcosm of the contemporary world, where criminality is leading the charge towards globalization and leaving the local law-enforcement officers dazed with the speed and force of the onslaught. It’s also a tremendously fun read, the whole imbued with a deadpan wit, particularly in the sections where the supposedly dumb-ass criminals use the jargon of business executives to discuss their trade. Swaggeringly self-assured, it reads like the work of a master in mid-career; that it’s only McFetridge’s second novel only adds to the satisfaction. -- Declan Burke
Dominic Maxwell, stage editor and chief comedy critic for the Times (London), named a critic's chart on American dramatists.Getting to Know Him Hugh FordinRead about all six books on Maxwell's chart.
The definitive biography of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist and playwright who, with Richard Rodgers, transformed musicals.
True Crime: An American Anthology edited by Harold Schechter (Library of America) 788 pagesRead about all of the titles in the feature.The serial-killer porn and Mafiosi tell-alls that swamp today’s non-fiction crime shelves rarely light my fire, but I’m a sucker for more ambitious fare such as True Crime, edited by Harold Schechter. And for once the generic title is appropriate. The tell, though, is in the subtitle. Because in this ambitious collection, Schechter presents a very convincing argument that crime is about as American as apple pie, with a boffo selection of red, white and blue mayhem from a star-studded list of contributors, both contemporary and historical -- everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin to Dominick Dunne and Ann Rule. The book also contains narratives of murder and violence that stretch from homicidal pilgrims at Plymouth to the Menendez brothers of Southern California. There’s an excerpt from Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, Mark Twain takes a few swipes at the myths of the “Wild West” and James Ellroy, in his unsettling “My Mother’s Killer,” lets slip his well-worn Mad Dog of Crime persona just enough to reveal a surprising glimpse of Sick Puppy. Cotton Mather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Damon Runyon, Jim Thompson and Ambrose Bierce also chip in, and the newspaper and magazine articles, journal excerpts and public documents they and others are responsible for make this almost 800-page tome an unforgettable reading experience. It’s one hell of a reference source and a bruising and bloody social history of the United States. Hell, there’s even a collection of lyrics here from several murder ballads, so you can hum along. Nervously, perhaps, while you wonder if you remembered to lock the side door. -- Kevin Burton Smith
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