As well as World Book Night, let’s have a Local Bookshop Year
Wallander: the secret of casting crime fiction for TV
Reasons to be cheerful about literature in translation
Authors, like Oscar winners, should keep their acknowledgements short | Stuart Evers
Judge a cover by its book
The conservative tastes of over-mighty retailers have resulted in generic jackets that say nothing about their contents
My first experience of Dan Rhodes's fiction was a tatty collection of A4 pages held together by a bulldog clip. Without a book jacket there were no visual...
What’s happened to political fiction?
Ideological fiction of the kind that Orwell wrote doesn't seem to fit our times. But two powerful new novels are closely tuned to politics of the apolitical
On the face of it, David Goodwillie's American Subversive hardly seems revolutionary. A terrorist attacks New York City. The next day...
How imprints left a lasting impression | Stuart Evers
The function of publishing houses may have changed, but within the book trade their significance remains undiminished
With such an impressive line-up of writers – including Jim Crace, Jackie Kay, William Fiennes and Trezza Azzopardi – it was no surprise that Picador Day at Foyle's was so well attended....
Will any other novelists ‘pull a Roth’?
Can we expect any other writer approaching old age hope to defy the odds as Philip Roth did with his American trilogy?
In the space of a week two email exchanges ended with my correspondent saying practically the same thing. "Don't write him off," they said of two different...
The great literary walk | Stuart Evers
Joshua Ferris's new novel The Unnamed poses an old question – why has walking inspired so much great writing?
The second half of Joshua Ferris's frequently brilliant, often perplexing The Unnamed is a "road" novel of the most curious kind. There is, for example, no ultimate goal. Tim...
The Easton Ellis generation
American Psycho left readers polarised, but its author has had a decisive influence on a new generation of writers
Gavin James Bower was a model and now is a writer. He is tanned, thin and has short hair. We are sitting at the Free Word Centre in London....
Brooklyn book festival’s independent example