Books, Issue 582

Norman Mailer

Writing about difficult subjects helped turn Norman Mailer into a literary star. Rodge Glass analyses his career and believes only he could have broken the final taboo

Katrin Himmler

Katrin Himmler was born into a family with a dark history, but has only now been able to write about it. She tells Doug Johnstone about reliving the past

Will Hutton

It’s not many people that can make dense economic theory and political machinations accessible to the casual reader, but Will Hutton is one such man. Formerly the editor-in-chief of the Observer and What the Papers Say political journalist of the year…

Batman Black & White Volume 3

(DC/Titan)

Usually at home as a simple back-up slot in the monthly Batman: Gotham Knights, Batman Black & White has taken on a life of its own and has quickly become a jewel in the crown of DC’s myriad caped crusader titles. A creative playground for various…

Rafael Reig

Depicting a futuristic Madrid

Rafael Reig, the author, lecturer and composer of a PhD thesis on 19th-century literary depictions of the prostitute, certainly knows how to choose an apt quotation.

Mark McNay

A piece of advice often doled out to people with creative aspirations is ‘don’t give up the day job’.

Alice Munro

Canadian legend in LongPen revolution

A standard piece of advice given to budding fiction writers eager for publication is to forget airy fairy, uncommercial notions of publishing short stories and dive headfirst into the novel.

Jennifer McCartney

Creative writer isn’t looking back

Jennifer McCartney’s debut is both a joyfully idyllic and strangely dystopian novel. Afloat tells the story of Bell, a student from Minnesota who works as a waitress at an elite resort on Mackinac Island where her initial happiness turns into confused…

Nick Cohen

Observing hatred in all its forms

Nick Cohen is a rare beast. A pro-invasion of Iraq commentator with impeccable left-wing credentials, he was moved to write What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way by a perception that liberals were forming an unholy alliance with fascism in failing to…

Frank Muir

If Festival visitors were asked where they expect Scottish crime novels to be set, a fair few would probably think of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh first, or Denise Mina’s Glasgow.

Joyce Carol Oates

The legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau once compared the versatility and precision of Oates’ writing to witchcraft. Oates once said of her own work, ‘I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life’. This perhaps…

Daljit Nagra

Daljit Nagra is very popular with the pupils he teaches English to at a north-west London school. Not because he lets them off with throwing paper aeroplanes across the room or allows them to bunk off early, but because he has injected them with a love…

Panos Karnezis

Panos Karnezis left a Sheffield engineering job for writing, looking for a new hobby. With a critically acclaimed short story collection and Whitbread-nominated novel, he has clearly surpassed the status of enthusiastic amateur. Poetic and arresting…

Iain Banks

Getting climate change into a family saga

Iain Banks can probably be accused of many things, but lack of imagination isn’t one of them. While most of his outlandish ideas get channelled into his sci-fi work, there’s still plenty of inventive stuff to be found in his mainstream novels.

Anthony Holden

Old school poker shark

As a biographer of the Royals, Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky, as well being the classical music critic of the Observer, Anthony Holden has always been a respected writer but it is the less respectable subject of poker that has given him his biggest sales.