Showing posts with label Novels. Show all posts

Friday, November 28, 2025

J. D. Salinger / The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye

The 100 best novels / No 72 / The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

To my mother

1

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London / Chapter VII

The Call of the Wild

by Jack London

I. Into the Primitive

II. The Law of Club and Fang

III. The Dominant Primordial Beast

IV. Who Has Won to Mastership

V. The Toil of Trace

VI. For the Love of a Man

VII. The Sounding of the Call

Chapter VII.

The Sounding of the Call

When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

Téa Obreht / The Tiger's Wife / Excerpt

‘The Tiger’s Wife’

By Téa Obreht

EXCERPT

1: The Coast

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past — the schools and dormitories of its youth, army barracks and tenements, houses razed to the ground and rebuilt, places that recall love and guilt, difficulties and unbridled happiness, optimism and ecstasy, memories of grace meaningless to anyone else — and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. For this reason, the living bring their own rituals to a standstill: to welcome the newly loosed spirit, the living will not clean, will not wash or tidy, will not remove the soul’s belongings for forty days, hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness.

Sam Bain / Why we love graphic novels

Sam Bain, comedy writer, co-creator of Peep Show

Why we love graphic novels

Sunday 5 November 2017

How did you get into graphic novels?
I read Marvel comics as a kid and began collecting them as a teenager. That started me going on pilgrimages to the central London comic shops, which were my gateway to the alternative comics universe.

What do you love about them?
Their scope. A comic can be anything from the biggest-budget blockbuster to the most intimate, personal story.

Do you have a favourite?
The four artists I’ve followed with the most devotion are Chester Brown, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes and Joe Matt. Peter Bagge’s Hate was a favourite of mine and Jesse [Armstrong]’s when we started writing sitcoms in the late 90s. The first 12 issues in particular are a perfect sitcom and so much fresher and more contemporary than what was on TV at the time.

Joe Matt’s Peepshow was also an influence, unsurprisingly! I had the opportunity to take Joe out for lunch in Los Angeles recently to thank him for his incredible body of work and to encourage him to produce more comics.

I’m also a big fan of Karrie Fransman – her Death of the Artist is one of the most astonishing graphic novels I’ve read in recent years.

Where do you buy them?
I have a standing order at Gosh! Comics in Soho. I remember reading the first issue of the brilliant Fluffy by Simone Lia cover to cover in Gosh! when it came out a few years ago. I felt bad that I hadn’t paid a penny for the privilege, so I emailed Simone to buy it from her direct. She’s become a friend and I love everything she produces.

Gosh! Comic shop, Berwick Street Soho London — Gosh! Comic shop, Berwick Street in London’s Soho. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer New Review

I fanboyed out at my first visit to San Diego Comic-Con this summer. I was plus-oned by Mat Johnson, an American writer friend who wrote the wonderful Incognegro. Mat managed to get me an invite to a dinner hosted by comics legend Karen Berger – the guests included Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Gibbons and Ann Nocenti, authors of some of the best superhero comics ever created. My teenage self was in paradise.

Any rituals around reading them?
I like to say a prayer and drink to world peace.

Sam Bain’s debut play ‘The Retreat’, directed by Kathy Burke, is at the Park Theatre, London N4 until 2 December

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Ethan Hawke / Why we love graphic novels

Ethan Hawke, actor, writer, director

Why we love graphic novels

Sunday 5 November 2017

How did you get into graphic novels?

I got into graphic novels as a teenager. I loved reading them on the bus to school. They used to make these supercool graphic novels of classics, like Moby-Dick, Macbeth, etc. The combination of the artwork and the literature just made life better. It shook the library dust off and made the stories alive for me.

What do you love about them?

I love staring at drawings anyway. And when juxtaposed with a real story… It’s a lot like what acting aspires to be. An interpretive art. Delivering secret messages.

Do you have a favourite?

Essex County by Jeff Lemire. It’s the Catcher in the Rye of graphic novels.

Where do you buy them?

My favourite spot is Forbidden Planet in New York. It’s magic. You’re a kid again, immediately. In the good way.

Any rituals around reading them?

The important thing is not to read them. Absorb them. Study the image. Find the message woven into the artist’s work. Don’t just look at the words. In a good graphic novel the words and the images are involved in a dance – like two stars smashing into each other, spraying silver and gold.

Ethan Hawke’s graphic novel with illustrator Greg Ruth, Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars, is published by Grand Central

THE GUARDIAN

Nick Hornby / Why we love graphic novels

Nick Hornby, novelist and screenwriter

Why we love graphic novels

Sunday 5 November 2017

How did you get into graphic novels?

I read more comics when I was a kid than books – Marvel as well as the Dandy and the Beano, so I already had a love for the form and the colours. But I hadn’t really thought about reading graphic novels until the beautiful 13th issue of McSweeney’s, and then I was introduced to the work of Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. They led me to Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi.

An image from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Photograph: Jonathan Cape

What do you love about them?

What’s not to love? The best ones are ambitious, serious-minded, and beautiful to look at.

Do you have a favourite?

Bechdel’s Fun Home and Satrapi’s Persepolis in particular are two of the most spectacularly successful works of art of the past 20 years. They ask for much less of your time than some giant prize-winning novel that you may never finish, so the experience is actually as cinematic as it is literary: in and out in two hours, with your life enriched during the process, if you’re lucky. (And if you’re not, you don’t end up wanting to hurl the book across the room.)

THE GUARDIAN

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Vargas Llosa / Five essential novels

Illustration by Patrick Bremer

Mario Vargas Llosa:

Five essential novels

BIOGRAPHY

If you're wondering where to start with the new Nobel laureate, here are five highlights from his work. But what are your favourites?

Benedicte Page
Thursday 7 October 2010 16.55 BST

The Time of the Hero (1963)

Vargas Llosa's first novel, published in Spanish as La Ciudad y Los Perros (The City and the Dogs), is set in a military academy in Peru, the Leoncio Prado Academy, which the author himself attended. When published, it caused such a stir that the academy's authorities burned 1,000 copies of the book in protest. The novel explores army codes and strict military hierachy, telling of a group of young cadets struggling to survive in a bullying and violent environment, a situation eventually leading to the murder of one of their number. The book was later filmed by Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)

This comic novel set in 1950s Lima tells of a student and aspiring writer - Marito - who falls in love with his uncle's sister-in-law, 13 years his senior. Marito also befriends a manic Bolivian scriptwriter, who's producing soap operas daily for a local radio station. The plot is loosely based on the story of Vargas Llosa's own first marriage, at the age of 19, to the then 32-year-old Julia Urquidi, who was indeed his aunt by marriage. Urquidi later gave a rather different account of her relationship with Vargas Llosa in a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say).

The War of the End of the World (1981)

Hailed as a tragic masterpiece, the novel was inspired by true events in Bahia, Brazil, in the late 19th century. At a time of economic decline following the breakdown of the Empire of Brazil, the poor are drawn to a charismatic preacher, Antonio Conselheiro, who is predicting the end of the world. Condemned by the church, Conselheiro takes his rag-tag band of followers to build a town at Canudos, set to be a new utopia. But Canudos exists in defiance of the national government, and violent conflict ensues when armies are sent to bring the prophet to order.

The Feast of the Goat (2000)

A savage portrait of political tyranny through the story of dictator Rafael Trujillo, "the Goat", whose bloody rule of the Dominican Republic lasted from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The novel follows the ageing Generalissimo through his last day on earth as his assassins circle, showing him as a grotesque character whose failing body is no bar to his preening machismo. A contrasting narrative strand explores the human impact of Trujillo's evil regime through the story of a woman betrayed in childhood by her father to the dictator's sexual depravity. The damage done by dictatorship is seen to continue after his death, as the effects of the old regime persist. The novel was praised for its vividness but criticised by some as heavy-handed.

The Bad Girl (2006)

Vargas Llosa's most recent novel features Ricardo Slim Somorcio, who, as a teenager in Peru in the 1950s, first meets a poor immigrant girl, Lily, and falls in love. But Lily suddenly disappears. Throughout the subsequent four decades, during which Ricardo works as a translator in various locations in South America and Europe, he keeps re-encountering "the bad girl", who has her eyes set firmly on the pursuit of money and power. Ricardo remains obsessed with her. At each meeting though Lily appears in a radically different disguise, chameleon-like, professing not to know him.

THE GUARDIAN

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Redhead by the Side of the Road,’ by Anne Tyler / An Excerpt

‘Redhead by the Side of the Road,’ by Anne Tyler: An Excerpt

1

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone. At seven fifteen every morning you see him set out on his run. Along about ten or ten thirty he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia. The times he leaves on his calls will vary, but not a day seems to go by without several clients requiring his services. Afternoons he can be spotted working around the apartment building; he moonlights as the super. He’ll be sweeping the walk or shaking out the mat or conferring with a plumber. Monday nights, before trash day, he hauls the garbage bins to the alley; Wednesday nights, the recycling bins. At ten p.m. or so the three squinty windows behind the foundation plantings go dark. (His apartment is in the basement. It is probably not very cheery.)

Zadie Smith / Why we love graphic novels

Zadie Smith, novelist

Why we love graphic novels

Sunday 5 November 2017

How did you get into graphic novels?

I read a lot of comics as a child, mainly those old Disney ones about Donald Duck and his nephews. Also Asterix and Tintin and that stuff. But the first adult graphic work that had a strong impact on me was Richard Appignanesi and Robert Crumb’s book about Kafka. It’s still one of my favourite books in any genre. Later I shared a flat with Richard’s son, Josh, who had a huge collection of Drawn and Quarterly stuff and manga and I read all that. When I first came to America, 18 years ago, I lived for a bit in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, back when it was a sort of proto-hipster area and there was a little pop-up book store on the corner that specialised in graphic novels and McSweeney’s issues. That’s where I found Chris Ware in pamphlet form, his Jimmy Corrigan in serialisation. Once I’d read Chris I was obsessed. One of my most treasured possessions is a sketch of Corrigan saying “Ha ha … hi Zadie…”, which I forced Chris to draw for me when I spent a day with him in London around 2000.

From Here by Richard McGuire — An image from Here by Richard McGuire.

What do you love about them?

Everything. To me they’re like opera, or musicals – they provide the satisfaction of multiple media in one space. I can just about imagine writing like Chris Ware but to write like Chris and draw like Chris blows my mind.

Do you have a favourite?

Too many. Corrigan, obviously, and all books by Ware, especially Building Stories. Here by Richard McGuire. All of Charles Burns, especially Big Baby. All of Dan Clowes, especially You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel. The Hernandez brothers, Lynda Barry, Tomine… these are all canonical and the list is endless, but of more recent finds, I am blown away by Walter Scott’s Wendy series, and both Beverly and Sabrinaby Nick Drnaso seem to me to be masterpieces. Joff Winterhart’s Driving Short Distances is extraordinary and also Everything Is Flammable by Gabrielle Bell. I still like finding things before they become books, but that’s harder to do as a middle-aged lady no longer often in comic stores. But on a visit to Los Feliz I found The Fade Out by Brubaker and Breitweiser in the old serial form, issues 1-5 (but missing 4) and fell in love, even with the gap in the tale.

From Jimmy Corrigan, by Chris Ware — A page from Jimmy Corrigan, by Chris Ware.

Where do you buy them?

In LA, at Skylight Books. When in New York, at McNally Jackson or the few comic stores left on St Marks.

Any rituals around reading them?

I just buy them and start reading them walking down the street. I’m usually done an hour after I’ve bought them. I read them with so much undiluted pleasure. I often joke with Mr Ware that what it takes him 10 years to write I can consume in 45 minutes. That’s one of the many reasons I find graphic artists remarkable. They work so hard for our pleasure and we work so little to receive it.

THE GUARDIAN