The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters

Set in 1940s wartime London, The Night Watch is the quietly engaging story of four survivors of the Blitz, whose paths cross at key junctures in their lives. “It’s a dark novel of blacked-out streets and bomb shelters,” author Sarah Waters says in an interview on Meet The Author. “It’s about people’s relatively quiet but […]

Lynne Truss would never say “Talk to the hand”

Lynne Truss is, if nothing else, highly entertaining. To prove it, I give you this offering: a charming author podcast, featuring Truss, who talks about and reads from Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. The reading, which is […]

In Katrina’s wake, New Orleans builds an appetite for cookbooks

There is one post-Katrina loss I kick myself for not thinking of: the fact that thousands of family recipes are gone forever. —Stacey Ornstein, The Paper Palate
In the long months after Hurricane Katrina, book donations have poured into New Orleans. Charity used-book sales have helped to match people who lost books with titles from […]

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty wins the Orange Prize

I’m not sure who was more excited that the U.K.’s Orange Prize for Fiction winners were announced yesterday: Zadie Smith, who won the £30,000 prize for On Beauty, or the bloggers at Eve’s Alexandria, where they blogged about the winners as they watched the webcast live.
You’ll find wonderful reviews of all the Orange Prize nominees […]

Summer’s mystery novels go Scandinavian cool

Just in time for summer reading comes a wave of Scandinavian crime fiction that promises to occupy the collective imagination of beach-lolling mystery aficionados for the season.
Leading the way, says NPR’s Steve Paulson, is Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, whose “Inspector Wallander” series already has an international English-speaking following (and outsells Harry Potter in […]

Will the Big Read be a big yawn?

Standby literary classics will receive more moments in the sun as the National Endowment for the Arts gears up to shell out substantial bucks to “encourage citizens to read for pleasure and enlightenment” as part of a program called The Big Read.
Pilot reading programs are underway at nine libraries and community institutions, where readers are […]

Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne. That principle ruled her life. It was mantra, fettle, and challenge. So that, at the age of thirty-four, after she had been given three children and had one taken away, when she had a futile husband […]

Great American novels and a few challengers from abroad

Ask 125 eminent (and graying) writers and editors, as The New York Times did, to name the single greatest American novel of the last 25 years and what do you get? A lot of arguing about what constitutes “American,” what constitutes “a novel,” and what constitutes “great,”—not to mention a few questions about whether it […]

What’s inside Cuppa Joad?

Welcome, book lovers!
Cuppa Joad is the project of a few Alibris staff members. We created this blog in order to share with you the books we’re reading, as well as the literature and the authors we love. Most important, we hope you’ll find Cuppa Joad to be a place—much like a comfortable corner bookstore—where book […]

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

As lauded as she continues to be, Zadie Smith hasn’t yet received all of the credit she deserves for the creation of On Beauty. To read the critics, Smith’s tribute to E.M. Forster’s Howards End is “an extraordinary academic comic novel” (Salon) about “the divisive cultural politics of the new century” (The New York […]