Cultural Capital: Books

Craig Thompson is a comic book artist and writer who found success and huge critical acclaim in 2003 with his poignant and sensitive coming-of-age story "Blankets". Now Thompson is ready to release his new comic, "Habibi", which was seven years in the making. A fantastical love story set in a 'landscape outside of time', echoing the work of Arundhati Roy, Karen Armstrong, and Vladimir Nabokov, "Habibi" promises to be one ... read more

Writing in the Independent, Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, applauds Jones's exploration of prejudice towards the working class, saying: "The book is very easy to read; it moves in and out of postwar British history with great agility, weaving together complex questions of class, culture and identity with a lightness of touch. Jones ... read more

"It's a joy to find this young author coming into his own, and bringing the craft of science fiction out of the backwaters where it's been caught lately," notes Ursula K Le Guin at the Guardian praising China Mieville's latest book Embassytown. The novel, she writes, "works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and ... read more

Writing in the Observer, Adam Mars-Jones finds Orhan Pamuk's The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist unintelligent: "The Nobel prize-winner's book of reflections on art and life is the high-culture equivalent of the celebrity fragrance...Sometimes the book makes sense, sometimes the fragrance achieves a distinctive balance of notes, but this outcome is largely accidental". More directly: "There is plenty of ... read more

In the week before Christmas, I had the pleasure of calling the most 21st-century of publishing meetings. With Anthony Barnett, founder of openDemocracy, the New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny and other members of the "editorial kettle", I spent over an hour on Google's instant messenger service Google Chat, engaged in a frenetic, six-way, typed debate about the merits and demerits of different articles on the student occupations.

The product of two ... read more

Writing in the Observer, Geoff Dyer is disappointed with "the story of how a great and ageing American writer came across a 640-acre spread of land in Wyoming, bought it and set about designing and building (more accurately, having people build) her ideal house on it." Despite some evidence of Proulx's "observational prowess and gift for verbally harnessing the ... read more

The novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last July aged 77, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times during her career -- but never won. Now the Booker Foundation has created a special prize in her honour -- the Man Booker Best of Beryl. Via an online poll on the Man Booker website, the public are invited to vote ... read more

In this week's New Statesman, John Gray enjoys Philip Ball's "light and graceful prose", which provides an "absorbing" cultural history of "anthropoeia" -- the project of artificially creating human life. Ultimately though, Gray finds the book's argument "self-defeating" as he attempts to "demythologise our thinking about humankind's place in the scheme of things", replacing one metaphysical myth with another.

Writing in the ... read more

The poet Jo Shapcott has won the Costa Book of the Year award for her collection, Of Mutability. It was a surprise result for the £35,000 award, as in the run-up to last night's award ceremony the ceramicist Edmund de Waal had been the favourite amongst the critics for his acclaimed memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

The critics were not the only ones who had thought that the result of ... read more

Derek Walcott has won the 2010 T S Eliot prize, for the best new collection of poems published in Great Britain or Ireland. He was awarded the £15,000 prize by T S Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot, at the Wallace Collection in London last night. As the chair of the judges, the poet Anne Stevenson, stressed, it had been a "bumper year" for poetry. Walcott's collection White Egrets had to compete ... read more

It's nearly fifty years since the death of one of France's greatest 20th century novelists: Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, more commonly known under his nom de plume, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. And yet there will be no officially sanctioned celebration for the author of Journey to the End of the Night and North. It has been decided by the Culture Minister, after strong protests from France's Jewish ... read more

Reviewing Eric Hobsbawm's 16th book in the Guardian, Stefan Collini concludes that it demonstrates "that Marxism has, despite its founder's famous proclamation, always contributed more to understanding the world than to changing it", whilst saluting the essay's "sheer intellectual quality."

From the Financial Times, Francis Wheen finds that though ... read more