Alice Munro

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

The greatest examples of the late writer’s uncanny ability to capture the many complexities of life range from stories of sex to loneliness

Lisa Allardice

Tue 14 May 2024 16.45 EDT

It is almost impossible to recommend a handful of Munro short stories. Over a writing career that spanned decades and led to many accolades, including the Nobel prize for literature, she produced countless stories, often set in southern Ontario, where she grew up and to where she returned in later life. Few writers captured the lives of “ordinary” people with as much grace and empathy – not to mention technical genius – as Munro. Her stories are anything but ordinary.

Andy Borowitz recommends the best Comic Writing

Do you have to be cruel to be comedic? It often helps, says bestselling humour writer, Andy Borowitz. He picks his favourite comic novels.

Interview by Eve Gerber
Marc 16, 2012

You’ve just turned the tale of a brush with death into a bestselling ebook that is by turns tragic, romantic, profound and just plain gross. Tell us about An Unexpected Twist and how you twist everything into comedy.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Top 10 books about great thinkers

From Kant’s routines to Frantz Fanon’s astonishing wartime work and Simone de Beauvoir’s vexed position in history, these books thread together ideas and the lives that animated them

Peter Salmon
Wednesday 18 November 2020

What is the relationship between the thinker and the thought? This is a question that all writers of intellectual biographies grapple with. One must relate the life to the thought without conflating them, without ascribing to every effect a cause, and every argument a reason. As Jacques Derrida warned, “You want me to say things like: ‘I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but …’ Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.”

And yet Derrida also argued that one of the great unacknowledged aspects of all philosophical writing is that it is a type of autobiography. Would Socrates have developed the gift of the gab if he wasn’t so ugly? Would Julia Kristeva have developed her ideas about the symbolic if she wasn’t an outsider by birth in her adopted France? Would Nietzsche have proclaimed the Overman if he was less shy at dinner parties?

The very best intellectual biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a place, and by exploring how they negotiate the difficult art of living through the products of their minds. Here are 10 wonderful books that thread together the lives and ideas of their thinkers in a way that intensifies our understanding of each.

1. St Augustine by Rebecca West
“I write books,” noted Rebecca West, “to find out about things.” Here my stone-cold favourite writer of all time turns her combination of searing intellect and droll wit on one of the shapers of Christianity. She is particularly moving on Augustine’s final encounter with his mother, Monica: perhaps, writes West, “the most intense experience ever commemorated”. As bold and opinionated as you’d expect from the woman who wrote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
For anyone studying philosophy, reading Wittgenstein can feel like taking a draught of cool water. Suddenly the deepest problems seem easy, to be mere problems of language, easy to solve. And then, as you read more deeply, that all falls apart as every problem becomes knottier, every question deeper still. Ray Monk’s biography is the gold standard in the genre, revealing a man whose life was as simple and complicated as his work.

3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil
Any thinker worth their salt needs to have a Simone Weil obsession at some point. No intellectual of the 20th century was as prepared to take their thinking to its logical conclusion, making her for many a secular saint. And yet sainthood is often better appreciated at a distance, as her niece Sylvie reveals. Sleeping on the floor next to a lovingly made bed at the house of your brother (the revered mathematician André Weil) is noble in the telling, irritating in the execution. A writer herself, Sylvie Weil presents a biography of three minds, working for and against each other.

Thorough … detail from Kant and His Comrades at the Table by Emil Doerstling, 1900. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn
Very few people read Kant for pleasure. If you know anyone who has, I’d like to have a chat to them. Kuehn’s biography is always promoted as revelatory, in that it shows Kant was occasionally five minutes late in having his breakfast, and sometimes put his shoes on in the wrong order. In fact this biography is everything Kant was – thorough, witty (in the way philosophy lecturers are witty: that is, not very) and goes on just a bit too long. Even the title is suitably dull. But, like The Critique of Pure Reason, it is also magnificent and to read it is to enter into a glorious dialogue with one of the great minds.

5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi
“To say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” It’s hard to go past Deirdre Bair’s biography of De Beauvoir. But Moi’s telling is also brilliant and affecting. A powerful, critical investigation of De Beauvoir’s thinking, it situates her in a history of female thinkers and the way their thought has been marginalised, or treated reductively as fully explicable by their lives (and loves). In a challenging read, Moi forces you to argue with her, and to be damn sure of your position as you do so.

6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey
Derrida’s childhood in Algeria was crucial to his thinking, as he himself noted, and one cannot write about Algeria without reading Fanon’s political works. Macey explores them brilliantly, but it is Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist that is a revelation. During the war of independence, Fanon often attended to patients suffering mental trauma after being tortured, as well as to the mental traumas of the torturers. That he attended to both with equal care is astonishing, and that he did so while writing the tracts that would make him famous is even more so. Macey does him justice, which really is saying something.

7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
One good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written (as well as his translations). His life of Jacques Tati is wonderful, but here he is in his element trying to pin the butterfly that is Perec. Perec is the sort of writer most writers want to be, brilliant, inventive and prolific, managing to combine huge erudition with the ability to tell a really good yarn. A novel without the letter “e” (or a novella that uses only that vowel)? Why not? A novel that does a knight’s tour of an apartment block and seems to cover every aspect of life as it skips around? Sure! We should all be grateful he found Bellos to write his story – no one else would have got it right.

8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has become the ne plus ultra of group biographies, to the point where any pitch for a book in this area these days has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a reason for this. Bakewell’s ability to connect a thinker’s ideas to their life and personality is impressive. I particularly love her slow, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the man: displaying Paul Celan’s books in the window of his local bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.

Angela Davis speaks at a street rally in Raleigh, 1974.

9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis
Note this is “An” autobiography, not “The” – Davis is always in action, and this is just one moment on the way somewhere, politically and intellectually. Writing in her late 20s, Davis had already served time in jail and been instrumental in the civil rights movement, making this an intoxicating trip through an era of incendiary politics and intellectual ferment. That she has maintained the rage and continued to put both body and mind on the line is exhilarating – another autobiography would be no less thrilling.

10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre is a bad biographer. In forcing Flaubert and Genet through the sausage machine of existentialism he performs the astonishing feat of making you want to avoid reading them. As a man, philosopher and novelist he is also hard to love. And yet love him I do, because of these diaries. They are the story of a mind finding itself, groping about for the theoretical scaffolding on which he would erect his thought. They are also the moving chronicle of a mind recovering from depression, thrown into a world of senseless chaos, before there was a Sartre to theorise absurdity. Of his breakdown, he writes: “I suddenly realised that anyone could become anything.” What he became is astonishing.

 An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon is published by Verso.

THE GUARDIAN

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Top 10 books of eco-fiction

As the climate crisis grows ever clearer, the best fiction can help realign our conception of nature

Michael Christie
12 February 2020

As our real-world ecosystem further devolves, we’ll soon move into the pining-for-our-ex-phase of the relationship – watching the BBC’s Planet Earth documentaries like old wedding videos after a nasty divorce. But books can reconfigure our conception of nature for the better.

My new novel, Greenwood, begins in 2038 on a remote island off the Pacific coast of British Columbia, where wealthy tourists flock from all corners of the dust-choked globe to visit the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral­ – one of the world’s last remaining forests. The story then travels back through time, telling the story of a family inextricably linked to the trees, from a biologist to a carpenter to an eco-warrior to a blind timber tycoon, describing how we went from fearing and mythologising our forests, to extracting enormous wealth from them, to fencing them off as luxury retreats.

Here are 10 great novels that have taken on this overwhelming story.

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The mother of all eco-fictions, a book that chronicles a man-made climate disaster before we knew what to call it. The dispossessed, hungry, and homeless migrate through baking dust in search of better lives, only to be turned back by callously protectionist locals. Sound familiar? It’s also a heartbreaking testament to the fact that eco-fiction need not be speculative. And even the most hard-hearted readers will be softened by Steinbeck’s eternally revolutionary idea: “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”

2. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin

A prescient novella about an interstellar logging colony, written by perhaps our greatest practitioner of “literary sci-fi”. Published in 1972, Le Guin’s book asserted that colonialism, extractivism, and environmental despoliation are endemic to humankind, and we surely haven’t proved her wrong in the years since. Concerning her novella’s similarities to the blockbuster film Avatar, which Le Guin described as “a high-budget, highly successful film” that “completely reverses the book’s moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution”, she wrote: “I’m glad I have nothing at all to do with it”. 

3. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
In her bold and strange novel, Watkins disassembles the mythology of the American west, paying particular attention to its brutal expansionism and unquestioned promise of personal reinvention. The story concerns a young couple trying to navigate post-apocalyptic California, where severe drought has baked the once fertile landscape into sandstorms and squalor. Peopled by wandering cults and water dowsers, Gold Fame Citrus shows us that perhaps the notions of “Shangri-La” and “Man-Made Hell on Earth” are two sides of the same ideological coin.

4. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
Published in 1962, and only Ballard’s second book, The Drowned World ought to be recognised as one of the pioneering works of climate fiction. By 2145, global warming has made slush of the ice caps (we knew this would happen, Exxon!), the seas have risen, and tropical swamps and jungles now dominate most of the Earth’s surface. A group of surveyors are sent from Greenland to soggy, flooded London to determine whether the southern world can someday be reclaimed. Writing during the era we believed most fervently that the world was ours to mould and shape, Ballard warned us that it wasn’t.

5. The Overstory by Richard Powers
Not the apocalypse so much as the prequel to it. Armed with more tree-related research than you can stack in your woodshed, Powers decentralises humans from his story to great effect, demonstrating how wanton deforestation and the reckless disregard for the complexity of natural systems have landed us in the mess we’re in. If you don’t come away from this novel with a deeper appreciation for trees, then you’re probably the CEO of a leading forestry company.

6. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
This brilliant National Book award-winning novel concerns the plight of Esch, a poor and pregnant 15-year-old, living with her family in Bois Sauvage, a mostly black Mississippi bayou town sitting smack dab in the path of hurricane Katrina. Set during the 12-day lead-up to landfall (plus a few days of aftermath), this mythic tragedy demonstrates what it means when the most vulnerable (and immobile) of us are struck by disaster. No novel draws a better link between personal traumas and climate traumas. In the storm’s wake, Esch muses: “Suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.”

The Road

7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Though the exact cause of the calamity that necessitates all kinds of scrabbling barbarism remains unclear, its human ramifications are described with ruthless specificity. In an interview, McCarthy later claimed that he imagined the disaster as the aftermath of a comet strike, but I don’t buy it. This is eco-fiction through and through. And now that I’m a father, I can’t help but read The Road as an ode to parenting in a fallen world; to sighting the disaster that you hope your children won’t have to face, but know deep-down they will and must. Regularly I have my own Road-type conversations with my sons: “Why do we buy gas if it’s destroying our planet, Dad?” “Because I need to get to work.” “Then why don’t you work somewhere closer to our house?” and on it goes. I mean really, what’s the best way to tell a child that this wondrous world they’ve just come to know is hurtling towards ruin?

8. American War by Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad tapped into his experience as a journalist in Afghanistan and the Middle East to prophesy a whole new history for the US, including the second civil war of 2074, which was just as barbaric as the first. The conflict was kicked off when the northern states outlawed fossil fuels after Florida was flooded with seawater, and, naturally, the southerners revolted, and the country again tore in half. A harrowing reminder that our old wounds can flare up in times of greatest turmoil.

9. Clade by James Bradley

The best eco-fiction doesn’t present our reckless alteration of the natural ecological order as a single apocalyptic event, with us playing the resident despoilers and the Earth our helpless victim. Instead it reminds us of our profound and inescapable interconnection with the natural world. Clade, Australian novelist James Bradley’s ingenious novel, tells the story of many generations of one family, all played out on a stage that is being incrementally destroyed by climate change, though few of the characters notice. Clade reminds us that world indeed won’t end with a bang, but with a long series of breakdowns, extinctions, die-offs, fires, floods, droughts, blights, and dust storms, during which our human lives will carry on just as messily as ever. And perhaps our greatest sin of all will be our failure to notice.

10. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
In rural Tennessee during an unrelenting period of unseasonable rain, a young woman named Dellarobia happens upon the uncanny spectacle of millions of monarch butterflies congregating in a field near her house. As competing interests fight to worship, capitalise upon, or preserve this unique phenomenon, the ensuing “Battle of the Butterflies” is a lesson in our frustratingly human tendency to focus on symptoms instead of root causes. As she watches the frenzied media coverage on her television, Dellarobia observes: “Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.’”

 Greenwood by Michael Christie is published by Scribe.

THE GUARDIAN

Robert McCrum / All Time Top 10

 

Joseph Conrad

All Time Top 10

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / An introduction by Robert McCrum

Book Review

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility.

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

Emily Brontë’s windswept masterpiece is notable not just for its wild beauty but for its daring reinvention of the novel form itself.

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

Wise, funny and gripping, Melville’s epic work continues to cast a long shadow over American literature.

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions.

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.

043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.

046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.

050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.

You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

THE GUARDIAN