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Kemal, the lovelorn protagonist of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, is a sort of Gatsby on the Bosphorus. He is upper-crust, cringe-inducing and, of course, harbors an obsession with a woman he can never really have. In truth, though, the comparison is unfair — to Pamuk. “The Museum of Innocence” is a mass of contrasts — it is granular and panoramic, satirical and yet grounded in reality. While this is a broadly familiar tale, it is also, in so many ways, a stunningly original work.
Spooner Hall “Spooner Hall: University of Kansas” (72 pages, 77 photos, $24.95) reads like a biography of a much-loved architectural landmark on the KU campus. Built in 1883, the Romanesque structure is still in use.
As you read Haleh Esfandiari’s memoir of imprisonment in Iran, it’s easy to lose track of time, both because her compelling tale draws you in and because similar situations are still playing out in her home country. Esfandiari’s one-week visit with her 93-year-old mother in Tehran in December 2006 turned into an eight-month international incident. She was accused of attempting to overthrow the regime by organizing lectures and conferences as the Middle East director of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
It is a provocative title. Perhaps you’ve been tagged “Girl in a Library.” Maybe you secretly admired a girl in a library rapt within the embrace of a book. “Girl,” “library,” these are words redolent with promise. But Kelly Cherry is too exacting and skeptical to traffic in romantic iconography.
The 60th annual National Book Awards was a night to celebrate literature and to wonder about its future. Lifetime achievement winner Gore Vidal envisioned only pulp and dust Wednesday as he contemplated the state of books, while fellow honorary winner Dave Eggers declared that we live in a golden age. The evening’s host, Andy Borowitz, joked that the meaning of publishing was “a lot of hard work. Then nothing.”
