What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

70 brilliant books for the summer

 

 

 

The Guardian 

Open to interpretation

The International Booker prize for translated fiction went to Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. Emma Loffhagen spoke to the pair, who will share the £50,000 prize, about Taiwanese politics, LGBTQ+ rights and more.

The International Booker rewards exceptional works of translation. But for this novel, translation takes centre stage in more ways than one: the work is presented as a translation of a rediscovered text, and one of the main characters is a Taiwanese interpreter. In today’s Bookmarks, we look at why translators and interpreters make fascinating protagonists, and why the singular roles they play in fiction reflect the value of their work in the real world.

There is a long tradition of novels featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists. In Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, published in 2001, Gen Watanabe bridges communication between captors and captives in a hostage crisis. Ricardo, the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, is an interpreter for Unesco. More recently, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer?, and, indeed, Taiwan Travelogue, have translators or interpreters at the centre of the action.

aggiungo Marias, Un cuore così bianco, uno dei miei scrittori e dei miei libri preferiti. 

a proposito di traduzione, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn (Canongate), recensito da Steven Pool, The Guardian 

The 100 best novels

Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

 

nell'elenco dei 100 romanzi più belli del Guardian di quest'anno compare, come al solito Il gattopardo (The Leopard), al 46 posto. L'unico altro romanzo italiano presente è Le città invisibili di Calvino (qui non sono d'accordo). The Guardian

Nuclear Fiction

When Leslie Schover ’74 was a girl, she remembers, her father returned from a business trip with a lump of green glass—sand melted by an atomic test. “You can’t keep this because it’s radioactive,” he told her. Schover’s dad helped make nuclear isotopes for the Manhattan Project, and she partly grew up in Oak Ridge, the secret city in Tennessee where the project was located.

Her family stories were often woven around WWII-related intrigue. 

The novel she’s based on those memories, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak, began germinating decades later when it was revealed that two of her father’s colleagues at Oak Ridge had actually been Soviet spies. “Did my dad know either one of them?” she says she wondered. “How indignant he would have been that they were spies!” Erik Ness, Brown Alumni Magazine

il libro di cui si parla è pubblicato da She Writes Press, una casa editrice interessante che si definisce ibrida, non tradizionale ma neanche self-publishing. Pubblica solo testi di donne. Nella foto: il padre e la sorella di Leslie Schover, nel 1946. 

A Very Cold Winter

A Very Cold Winter, by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit). This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war. The New Yorker

International Booker Prize 2026 Longlist

 “Many of the submitted books examined the devastating consequences of war, which is reflected in our longlist,” said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown. “The list also features petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, big pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison, and obscure film references. The page counts range from ‘pocket-friendly’ to ‘doorstopper’. And while the books’ original publication dates span four decades, each story feels fresh and innovative.” Ella Creamer, The Guardian

Departure(s)

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs. Alex Clark, The Guardian

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape. 

triste! 

Christmas time is for murder

It’s not exactly the cosy, fireside Christmas story readers might be hoping for, but Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is the most polished example of a perplexing subgenre of crime fiction: the festive murder mystery. Lou Selfridge, The New Statesman

qualche bel giallone per digerire le feste natalizie... 

The books to look out for in 2026

2026 is already promising plenty of unmissable releases: there are new novels by George Saunders, Ali Smith and Douglas Stuart, memoirs from Gisèle Pelicot, Lena Dunham and Mark Haddon, and plenty of inventive debuts to look forward to. Here, browse all the biggest titles set to hit shelves in the coming months across fiction and nonfiction, selected by the Guardian’s books desk. The Guardian

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. [...] The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. [...] Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. [...] Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. [...] But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular. Sloane Crosley, The Yale Review

The biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… The Guardian

Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries

Il titolo completo di questo articolo è "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now" e il sottotilo, ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline.

Riusciranno elfi sexy, cavalcatori di draghi scatenati e fate vogliose a salvare l’editoria? Il romantasy oggi genera 20 milioni di copie all’anno. Anna Louie Sussman, The Wall Street Journal

Italiani in traduzione

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character. Domenico Starnonte, "Tortoiseshell," The New Yorker

 

I read “Perfection” in a single hypnotized sitting. Time disappeared, as it does for Anna and Tom. In the following days, I described the book to myself with words like “flat” and “clinical” and “affectless.” I thought of it as a “case study” or a “kind of ethnography.” Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive. “Perfection” is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences—all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction but which had, in this case, been obscured by proper nouns and mimetic precision. This is intentional, of course. Alice Gregory, The New Yorker 

il romanzo di Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection è stato pubblicato da Fitzcarraldo Editions e tradotto da Sophie Hughes

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes [...] Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa).

 

The books to look forward to in 2025

 

David Shariatmadari, The Guardian

BUON ANNO!

Untold Lessons

It is 1970 in the northern Italian city of Biella, and a teacher has gone missing. The disappearance of Silvia seems to be linked to the death of her pupil Giovanna, a girl who was beaten at home ... John Self, The Guardian

è stata una sorpresa trovare sul Guardian - tra i libri recentemente tradotti in inglese - il romanzo di Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, che in Italia si intitola Tornare nel bosco ed è edito da Marsilio. Non lo conosco, ma l'ho cercato in versione kindle. Mi incuriosisce, così come mi incuriosisce l'autrice. Tra l'altro si svolge sulle colline e nei boschi della mia infanzia.

Rebecca Watson: ‘What are siblings: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies?

The author of I Will Crash, about an estranged brother and sister, looks at other books on difficult sibling relationships, from authors including Sally Rooney and Julia Armfield. Rebecca Watson, The Guardian

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson is published by Faber.

The 2024 Booker prize shortlist

Among the shortlisted women are “real heavyweight writers” who are “perhaps undersung” in terms of the “massive commercial success that they should have had”, added Collins, pointing to British writer Samantha Harvey and her fifth novel Orbital; Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, shortlisted for Held; and Australian novelist Charlotte Wood, chosen for Stone Yard Devotional.

Shortlisted alongside them are American writer Rachel Kushner with Creation Lake and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted and lone debut novelist to feature with The Safekeep. Completing this year’s shortlist is Percival Everett with James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The Guardian

Tell me everything

“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections. Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, un elenco dei libri di narrativa e saggistica in uscita quest'autunno