John Baker’s Blog

William Kowalski at the Globe & Mail makes the case for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby:
Gatsby the man is a complete fiction, as he admits to narrator Nick Carraway: Just as the United States was carved from the wilderness, he fashioned himself an identity as a wealthy, Oxford-educated gentleman, sustaining it through sheer determination and bravado - that [...]

At the Times Online Ben Macintyre considers the art of a good book title
The words that matter most in any book, of course, are neither at the beginning nor the end, but on the front cover. Would great books have become great books had they been called something else? In 1924, a young writer sent [...]