'Instead of just saying the word "no"...

she was quick to reply 'Not at all, as the fish said,' or just 'As the fish said,' or simply 'Fish,' to summarize this saying: 'Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he'd like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.'

- Alejandro Zambra, via James Wood, in The New Yorker

Facebooks - IV

A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar
How Fiction Works - James Wood
Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of... - Ranulph Fiennes
The Viceroy of Ouidah - Bruce Chatwin
'Art' - Yasmina Reza
The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans
The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
Solo - Rana Dasgupta
Growing - Leonard Woolf
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S Thompson

Gotta love James Wood

Days after [Donna Tartt] was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”

- Evgenia Peretz, in Vanity Fair

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

On the other hand...

Today, the average work of literary fiction appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. Even the novelists you may think of as “hyped” are in fact relatively obscure; I’ve got a battalion of perfectly intelligent cousins who have never heard of either Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers. Sure, they know who James Patterson is, but they also know he’s no artist. They’ve never read a book because it was praised as a work of genius on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and they are oblivious to the existence of James Wood.

- Laura Miller, Salon