This month’s best paperbacks November and December

 

Claire Keegan

This month’s best paperbacks

November and December

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some excellent new paperbacks, from powerful essay collections to a Booker-shortlisted novel

Wed 23 Nov 2022 11.00 GMT

Mario Vargas Llosa

Notes on the Death of Culture Mario Vargas Llosa

A powerful polemic

In this powerful polemic first published in Spanish ten years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa explores what he considers to be the demise of culture. The Peruvian author, who was born in 1936 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, begins by discussing the “metamorphosis of what was still understood as culture when my generation was in school or at university, and the motley definitions that have replaced it”. After briefly surveying earlier attempts to understand culture, including works by TS Eliot, George Steiner, Guy Debord and Frédéric Martel, he concludes that in his lifetime it has undergone a “traumatic change”. So much so, that culture has been “discreetly emptied of its content”.

A life in writing / Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett

A life in writing: Ann Patchett

'If I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what?'

Susanna Rustin
Friday 10 June 2011 10.05 BST

W

hen Ann Patchett decided to set her sixth novel in the Amazon, she called up her editor on the glossy magazine Gourmet, and asked him to arrange a trip.

"I really wanted to be on a boat but they couldn't find the right boat in Brazil, it was either a cruise ship which I didn't want or a raft with cockroaches which I didn't want. I wanted something very small but nice and they found it in Peru, it was called the Aqua and I think it had a dozen rooms and it was absolutely gorgeous."