LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Sarah Waters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Waters and http://www.sarahwaters.com/) is a Welsh born novelist best known for her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998). In 2002, this novel was adapted into a three-part television series of the same name for BBC 2. If Victorian lesbian cunnilingus holds any appeal for you, the novel and DVD (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tipping-Velvet-Complete-BBC-DVD/dp/B00007DL9J/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1418862038&sr=1-1&keywords=tipping+the+velvet) would make for a fine Christmas gift. Novels that […]

Matthew Thomas (http://www.matthewthomasauthor.com/) was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the

This is a big, powerful, compelling and illuminating novel set in West Bengal in the late 1960s from Neel Mukherjee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neel_Mukherjee_(writer) and http://www.neelmukherjee.com/). The book explores power, oppression and rebellion both in the household of the Ghosh family and the society that surrounds it. From its unforgettable and shocking opening to its thought-provoking conclusion, it’s

Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (1927) by Theodore Francis Powys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.F._Powys) is a strange and delightful book. The story and the style are unfathomably simple. Accompanied by an assistant called Gabriel, a woolly-haired wine-seller drives into a small Dorset town called Folly Down. Time stops, and the sign on the battered van appears in the sky. Some

Ali Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Smith) was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Like (1997), Hotel World (2001), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999), The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003), The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), There but for the (2011).

Jenny Offill’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Offill and http://jennyoffill.com/) slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old ‘seafoodetarian’ who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mitchell_(writer)) immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The

Martin believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and later arouses a