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Mukherjee.

Morning Book News: Lauren Oliver's Young Adult Fiction Factory and the Winner of the Guardian First Book Award

A report on Lauren Oliver, who wrote the young adult novels Delirium and Before I Fall, and her fiction factory, Paper Lantern Lit. [BusinessWeek]

Siddhartha Mukherjee wins the Guardian‘s First Book Award for his history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. [Guardian]

Europeans appear less interested in e-books. The Times blames taxes. [NYT]

Abe Books sells a first edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital for $51,739. [Abe Books] Read More

books

"The Angel Esmeralda" by Don DeLillo.

Conversation Starter: Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

Don DeLillo’s novels have tended to be loose, crisscrossing sagas, covering large spans of space and time. They are explorations, many-angled and painstaking, of the primal scenes of postwar American life, with a democratic regard for the power of crowds and a sports fan’s relish for the spectacular. It is not surprising that the greatest sequences this reclusive New Yorker has written, the prologues to Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997), take place in baseball stadiums. Read More

Don DeLillo Returns

Point Omega
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, 128 pages, $24.95

The century ended. Says Richard Elster, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s 15th novel, Point Omega: “I’d try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I’d figure out how old I’d be when the century ended, years, months, days, Read More

DeLillo’s 9/11 Resists Gravity

FALLING MAN
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, 256 pages, $26

Don DeLillo already owned the Twin Towers—in 1997, he chose for the cover of Underworld a haunting Kertesz photograph of the World Trade Center looming in the murk, disappearing up into cloud, a soaring pigeon standing in for a hijacked airliner. And he owned Read More

Gotham’s Greats Get Super-Bios

It’s a season of cliffhangers. Who will emerge as top dog in a transatlantic face-off when Don DeLillo and Ian McEwan each publish a new novel on the very same day? Will anyone come up with a better title for a book about working moms than The Feminine Mistake, by Vanity Fair writer Leslie Bennetts Read More

Cook and Carlyle: Last of the Best

Barbara Cook is always opening somewhere. This is good for those of you who are still interested in hearing what the most beautiful voice on the cabaret planet sounds like. But this is bad for those of us who get paid to write abut her. Every time she works Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center or Read More

The King of Splatter Crit Lays Down His Weapon

Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature , by Dale Peck. The New Press, 228 pages, $23.95.

Dale Peck is not the best literary critic of his generation. He’s not even second-best. It’s also true that there are pitifully few writers in his generation who could plausibly be called literary critics (the rest just write Read More