Let others write about rags-to-riches, Rushdie prefers to tell us about riches-to-rags. Even our hero's face, body and internal organs take a severe beating during the course of these pages, and not all of his constituent parts survive to the end of the book...
"In 1981, in Caracas, I put a sheet of paper in my type-writer and wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits ," Allende later recalled. "At that moment I didn't know for whom I was doing it, or from whom."...
Parents in Medicine Bow, Wyoming rejected Updike's work for its frankness and profanity, while as recently as 2010, Updike's writing was kept out of Texas jails in order to "protect the safety and security of our institution, but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders."...
Where others offer plot, Link - what an appropriate name for this writer! - moves ahead on the basis of free association. I'm reminded of Yogi Berra's advice: "You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."...
When granting Günter Grass the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy lauded him for "recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them." These words would later take on unintended irony....
What was the first magical realism novel? Some may point to books by Gabriel Garcia Márquez or Italo Calvino or Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, but my choice predates those works by almost 2,000 years....
This is an imaginative book that expands our sense of the possible, but also a thought-provoking work about different levels of responsibility - of child to elder, of doctor to patient, of people to animals, of races and religions to each other....
Readers remember this book for its fanciful impossibilities. Yet Gabriel Garcia Márquez starts his narrative with the exact opposite - tapping the unexpected power to delight of the commonplace: magnets, a telescope, false teeth and a trip to ponder the hitherto unknown marvel of ice...
His career, began with a joke, which is the literal translation of the title of Milan Kundera's debut novel Zert. The punchline could have been predicted by readers of this author's work - who know that, for Kundera, jokes are seldom a laughing matter...
Forget the Nobel Prize in literature. The highest literary honor, accorded to a nobler elite, comes when an author's name enters the language as an adjective. Hence "Rabelasian" which my dictionary defines as "bawdy, coarse, gross, lusty, raunchy."...
The main characters of Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road , winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, move back and forth between the human and spirit worlds with the ease of urban commuters changing subway trains....
An unexpected disclaimer is hidden in the small print at the front of my edition of Like Water from Chocolate , the debut novel by Laura Esquivel: "The recipes in this book are based on traditional Mexican recipes and have not been tested by the publisher"....
No author has attempted a more ambitious or thorough literary regeneration of Manhattan than Mark Helprin. In his 1983 novel Winter's Tale , Helprin aims for nothing less than an apotheosis of the city, a sanctification by fire that, at times, crosses beyond the familiar terrain of the novel and enters into the realm of myth or dogma....
I have noticed that short quotes from books are very popular on the emerging media. After all, why read a 800-page novel, when you can savor the best passages in 140-character tweets? With that in mind, I have distilled Mr. Delany's Dhalgren into some bite-size extracts suitable for Twitter....
Remember that ridiculously long novel on magicians in a fantastical England that came out in 2004? Who would have thought that a supersized work of imaginative fiction—almost 900 pages long!—would find such an enthusiastic audience? What’s that you say? Harry Potter ? Hogwarts? I don’t know what you're talking about.....
Welcome to my year of magical reading. Each week during the course of 2012, I will explore an important work of fiction that incorporates elements of magic, fantasy or the surreal. My choices will cross conventional boundary lines of genre, style and historical period—indeed, one of my intentions in this project is to show how the conventional labels applied to these works have become constraining, deadening and misleading.
In its earliest days, storytelling almost always partook of the magical. Only in recent years have we segregated works arising from this venerable tradition into publishing industry categories such as "magical realism" or "paranormal" or "fantasy" or some other 'genre' pigeonhole. These labels are not without their value, but too often they have blinded us to the rich and multidimensional heritage beyond category that these works share.
This larger heritage is mimicked in our individual lives: most of us first experienced the joys of narrative fiction through stories of myth and magic, the fanciful and phantasmagorical; but only a very few retain into adulthood this sense of the kind of enchantment possible only through storytelling. As such, revisiting this stream of fiction from a mature, literate perspective both broadens our horizons and allows us to recapture some of that magic in our imaginative lives.