Blogs

John Irving's Top Ten List

 
John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” opens with a very funny scene about a young man whose efforts to check out a book are complicated by his lust for his local librarian.
 
While most readers will focus on the character’s aching tumescence, we Top Tenner’s have but one question: What book is he trying to check out?
 
We can also guess the answer, because it is one of Irving’s very books (pip, pip, hooray!).
 

Tom Bissell's Top Ten List

Top Tenner Tom Bissell receives a mixed but interesting review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review for “Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation.”
 

Diana Abu-Jaber's Top Ten List

 

Diana Abu-Jaber is the newest member of the Top Ten Family. She is a versatile writer of memoir, fiction and essays whose work focuses on the nexus and tension between identity and culture – a natural topic for Diana, the daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and Jordanian Muslim father.

Ann Patchett Demands a Pulitzer For Somebody

Ann Patchett has offered an eloquent response to the Pulitzer committee that decided not to award a prize in fiction this year. She writes:
 
"Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
 

Heidi Julavits's Top Ten List

 

Reviewing Heidi Julavits’s new novel, “The Vanishers,” in the New York Times Book Review, Cristina Garcia writes:

 

Meg Wolitzer's Top Ten List

Francine Prose threw down the gauntlet in the literary gender wars with her 1998 essay in Harper’s, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink.”
Meg Wolitzer picked it up and threw it back down again – smack – last Sunday in The New York Times Book Review. Her title says it all: “The Second Shelf: Are there different rules for men and women in the world of literary fiction?” (Hint: the answer isn’t negative, though I wouldn’t call it positive, if you know what I mean.).

Craig Nova's Top Ten List

Our newest list comes from Craig Nova, of whom Jonathan Yardley remarked: “Craig Nova is a fine writer, one of our best. If you haven’t read him, the loss is yours.”
David Bowman of Salon concurred: “He’s a novelist who has yet to write a supermarket bestseller…but he has written at least two American classics that will likely resonate after his death, the way the poor-selling ‘Great Gatsby’ did for poor ol’ F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Thomas Mallon’s Top Ten Books

Thomas Mallon has been receiving strong reviews for his new novel, Watergate.