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Category: Books About Books, Publishing

April 28, 2022

In the Margins by Elena Ferrante

Translated by Ann Goldstein Review by Anna Hollingsworth There’s something fascinating about writers writing about, well, writing and reading. I care more about writers’…

March 10, 2022

After Agatha: Women Write Crime by Sally Cline

Review by Karen Langley We readers have never been able to get enough of crime fiction, it seems, and in the 21st century the…

March 1, 2022

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson

Review by Liz Dexter While he’s now a publisher and editor with his own imprint, Hodkinson grew up in a terrace house in Rochdale…

February 24, 2022

Great Literary Friendships by Janet Phillips

Reviewed by Harriet When you see the title of this book, you may think, as I did initially, that it was going to be…

February 22, 2022

Stalin’s Library, by Geoffrey Roberts

Review by Basil Ransome-Davies One review of this book has come on quite strong against Roberts’ view of Stalin – prominent among the twentieth…

February 17, 2022

Living and Dying With Proust, by Christopher Prendergast

Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be…

August 19, 2021

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber

Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long In 2019 I attended a lecture given by Toby Faber and found him to be as stylish and witty as…

July 13, 2021

A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage

Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the…

July 6, 2021

Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu

Review by Helen Parry Reconstructing anyone’s life poses enormous difficulties, for however copious the evidence of letters, diaries, journals, and eye-witness accounts, the problem…

June 7, 2021

Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden

Review by Liz Dexter  The processes of selection, acquisition and cataloguing, as well as of disposal and retention, are never neutral acts. They are…

May 27, 2021

Reviewer’s Choice: Twentieth Century Paris (1900-1950) – A Literary Guide for Travellers by Marie-José Gransard

While Shiny New Books concentrates on the new, occasionally, we give our reviewers room to share previously published – ie: ‘not Shiny New Books’…

May 4, 2021

The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn

Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic…

April 20, 2021

Commemorative Modernisms by Alice Kelly

Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the…

April 1, 2021

Hyphens & Hashtags* by Claire Cock-Starkey

Reviewed by Liz Dexter Subtitled “The stories behind the symbols on our keyboards” (the subtitle linked to the main title via an asterisk rather…

December 1, 2020

Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the world by Mark Aldridge

Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was younger and read every Agatha Christie book I could lay my hands on, she always produced a…

November 12, 2020

The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More than Words by Tom Mole

Paperback review by Liz Dexter Tom Mole, as Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh, is certainly qualified to…

November 5, 2020

The Artful Dickens by John Mullan

Reviewed by Harriet Professor John Mullan’s name will be familiar to many readers: he writes regularly in the Guardian and the London Review of…

August 20, 2020

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven

Reviewed by Liz Dexter As you would expect from an Oxford Illustrated History of … this is a sumptuous production, world-wide in scope and…

Cover by Peter Mendelsund
August 11, 2020

Cover by Peter Mendelsund

Reviewed by Harriet Ed’s Note: Six years after its publication in hardback, Mendelsund’s Cover gets a paperback release, so we are reposting Harriet’s original…

April 9, 2020

A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings

Review by Simon There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the…

February 6, 2020

Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin by Clive James

Review by Karen Langley My love of the poetry of Philip Larkin is no secret; I’ve written about him numerous times on my own…

January 30, 2020

Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, by Barry Forshaw

Review by Basil Ransome-Davies When I started teaching popular fiction courses forty years ago, having always been more drawn to Jesse James than to…

January 23, 2020

Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor

Review by Gill Davies Women read a lot more fiction than men; they also buy more books, attend writers’ events, blog, exchange ideas, and…

Tales of the troubled dead catherine belsey
December 5, 2019

Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History – Catherine Belsey

Review by Hayley Anderton Tales of the weird have a deep hold on our collective imagination, and of all the things we’ve given credence…

confessions bookseller shaun bythell profile
October 1, 2019

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Review by Simon As the cover of Confessions of a Bookseller tells us, Bythell is an international bestseller. A couple of years ago, The…

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