John Baker’s Blog

At the Times Online site, Rod Liddle presents the books that make him see red:
Powell’s name came up an awful lot as I importuned a bunch of writers and hacks about books they had read that now, when mentioned, make the red mist descend. Books that made them angry just thinking about them; that were [...]

Lucy Ellmann in the New York Times gives Chuck Palahniuk a scathing review for his latest novel, Snuff.
So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts [...]

That Shakespeherian Rag examines the dominance of middle-brow culture, VS Naipaul, the larger publishing houses and the market:
Gone are the days when Jack McClelland would publish a seminal Canadian novel like Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers even though he confessed to being baffled by it. In a 1965 letter to Cohen, McClelland wrote, “[E]ven though I [...]

Lebanese author Rawi Hage, writing in his third language, has won the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for his novel De Niro’s Game.
The Guardian reports:
Hage, now 44, started working as a novelist relatively late, having trained as a photographer. “Someone told me I should be writing,” he says, after which he started writing a short [...]