LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Edgar Lawrence “E. L.” Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015, http://www.eldoctorow.com/) was an American author, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction. Many regard him as one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century. His novels The Book of Daniel (1971) and Ragtime (1975) may be better known, […]

The Accidental Tourist is a novel by Anne Tyler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Tyler) that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986. The novel was adapted into a 1988 award-winning film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis,

Larry McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. His novels include Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films earning 26 Academy Award nominations. This

There was a day and age when a nine year old girl was not permanently fixated upon her smartphone. This was a time when you could be separated from the gizmo for more than five minutes without plunging into the severe anxiety which is now being reported (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/14/nomophobia-smartphone-separation-anxiety_n_7282008.html). Such an age was the Second World

Nigella Lawson has embarked on another of her celebrity cook series on television this season at the end of 2015 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/programmes/b06nvzkg). Her opening remarks in the first episode of ‘Simply Nigella’ gushed to the effect that life is worth celebrating in every single meal that one prepares. It’s as easy as popping round to your local

Isabel Allende ( http://www.isabelallende.com/en/home/8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende) is arguably the world’s most widely read Spanish language author. She has had a long and fascinating life which reflects so much of the history of our times. This magical realist novel catapulted her to literary fame, and it was in virtue of this and her wider oeuvre that she

Antonio Tabucchi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Tabucchi) was an Italian academic deeply interested in Portuguese culture, which he taught at The University of Sienna. His novel ‘Sostiene Pereira’ (translated as ‘Pereira Declares’, and sometimes‘Pereira Maintains’) has received international recognition. The novel is set in Portugal in the summer of 1938, during the dictatorship of Salazar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_de_Oliveira_Salazar). The summary is as

The reclusive German writer Patrick Süskind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Suskind) produced one internationally acclaimed bestseller. This was Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.  The novel examines what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion, his sense of smell, leads to murder. The summary is as follows. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

Vasili Grossman (12 December 1905 – 14 September 1964, http://grossmanweb.eu/en/home.asp/) was a Soviet Russian writer and journalist. A Ukrainian Jew, he was trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed his career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he became