Morvern Callar

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Alan Warner (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/life-in-writing-alan-warner and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Warner) gives us this peculiarly Scottish tale of purposelessness and amorality set in the 1980s. For it he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Maugham_Award). Morvern Callar, a low-paid young woman in the local supermarket of a desolate and beautiful port town (Oban??) in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find […]

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The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Antonio Damasio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio and http://www.ted.com/speakers/antonio_damasio.html) does not claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is fortunate, because in many senses Damasio’s book does not provide much new information about consciousness and why its highest forms occur only in humans. Instead, Damasio

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The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression was the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood (1991). Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can’t summon the will

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Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Andrew O’Hagan (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-ohagan and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_O’Hagan) has been a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. In the novel we meet Hugh Provan who has been a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a

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Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Edith Pearlman (http://www.edithpearlman.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Pearlman) writes intelligent, perceptive, funny and  beautiful stories. She is the author of three previous collections, Vaquita,  Love Among the Greats and How to Fall.  Her themes are the predicaments — odd, wry, funny and painful — of human life. Her characters are sophisticated, literate, relatively affluent and often musical. They travel, they read, they go to

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Harvest by Jim Crace

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Inimitable, Jim Crace (http://www.jim-crace.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crace) stands on his own ground among living English novelists. Immune to trends, guided by his own singular star, he has sown and grown an 11-volume shelf of finely crafted, intensely atmospheric books. Each novel fashions a unique climate, landscape and mood, a far cry from everyday realism though nothing to

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The Wavewatcher’s Companion

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Gavin Pretor-Pinney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Pretor-Pinney) achieved unexpected success with his previous book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, an appreciation of the different types of water vapour masses that fill our skies. Now the author has produced what he claims is a natural follow-up. ‘A mere cloud-spotter is, in fact, without even realising it, a wave-watcher, since clouds are often borne

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