fieldus

Part way through Zadie’s NYRB article, Two Paths for the Novel, looking at Netherland (next up) and Remainder.
Ambitious and serious, even pretentious.
I may be wrong, but I think I saw ZS in Bloomsbury: walking a small pooch.
For more discussion see RSB.

Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk
Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.
It sits uncomfortably with [...]

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize - NYTimes.com
Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current [...]

LRB · Benjamin Kunkel: Men in White

…there is, after all, just the one world or, for the individual, the one life. We also know that originality, in realist fiction, comes not only from capturing what’s historically new but also from correlating novelty with persistent inherited ways of acting, thinking and feeling. But the challenge posed [...]

Salon reviewDiary - in the LRBObserver reviewNew York Times reviewBookslut reviewLasdun interview @ identitytheory.com
Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:
Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by [...]