Word: novelists
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First-time novelist Stef Penney won Britain's Costa Book of the Year award this month for The Tenderness of Wolves, a vivid portrait of life in snowswept Canada. The book's realism is particularly impressive since Penney has never visited the country. Suffering from agoraphobia, she could only make it as far as London's British Library to do her research. But fictional fudging is an illustrious tradition (Shakespeare almost certainly never left England, either) - and other acclaimed modern authors have gotten by with less meticulous research...
...rest of us, perhaps it's enough to drop the odd smart reference to June 16, 1904 (that's Bloomsday for Joyce fans, or, dear nonreaders, the day Ulysses takes place), the evocative aroma of madeleines (nostalgia muffins to novelist Marcel Proust), or George Eliot (remember, she was a woman). Bayard argues that the real secret to knowledge, cultivation and passionate reading lies in avoiding the traditional, linear approach to books. "Books aren't so much made to be read, as they are to be lived with," he says. Hey, doesn't that remind you of something Franz Kafka once...
...articles by and for parents who can't quite believe they ended up doing something as square as raising a kid. (In his Babble blog Baby Daddy, Steve Almond endearingly refers to his 3-month-old as "the little f___er.") In a typical hipster-parent offering, an edgy novelist, musician or feminist sex writer has a baby--Me! Who'd'a thunk it!--and wrestles to reconcile his or her sensibility with the numbing demands of the cradle. For blogger Rebecca Woolf, that moment came when her baby barfed on the Moby section at an indie record store...
...Howl of this movement is Neal Pollack's new memoir Alternadad (Pantheon). Pollack, a novelist and erstwhile punk-rock frontman, sets out to make sure that in a world of Disney and Barney, his baby Elijah, now 5, will be cool (and thus that Dad will remain so). He home schools the boy in hipster culture, taking him to blues shows and playing him a curated collection of punk. Goodbye, Baby Mozart; hello, Baby Ramone...
...Chowk as the main setting for his ambitious 750-page novel of politics, commerce and manners in modern India. The Peacock Throne does for Delhi and democracy what Vikram Chandra's recent 900-page Sacred Games does for Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and organized crime. Or what 19th century European novelists did when economic and intellectual winds howled: produce teeming, sprawling, barn-burning novels that try to describe everything in sight. The surprise is that Saraf is not, strictly speaking, a novelist. He works full-time as a space scientist for a U.S. defense contractor. Writing is a sideline...