Bethanie Blanchard

Last year, it became difficult to escape the presence of a particularly provocative book cover. Ostensibly showing the front of an unbuttoned pale pink gingham dress, the cover focuses upon an open buttonhole which is puckered slightly, undeniably suggestive of a vulva. Where the cover was evocative, the contents were explicit, and the novel, Tampa, […]

The opening page of Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, Little Failure, begins with the young author standing in a now closed branch of New York’s famous bookstore The Strand, reading a page of St Petersberg: Architecture of the Tsars. ‘As part of my freewheeling, four-hour daily lunch break,’ he writes, ‘I would eat and drink my way … […]

Dazzling, luminous, vast. These were the words the Man Booker Prize chair of judges used to describe the 2013 winning novel, The Luminaries by 28-year-old writer, Eleanor Catton. The triumph was significant for two reasons: Catton was the youngest author ever to receive the prize, and her intricate tome, The Luminaries – a complex, ambitious, […]

‘They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew.’ So Bret Easton Ellis begins his new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, with characteristic metafiction, and like some blob from a 1950s horror film, in seeps the external world to the imagined one of the novel. Ellis’s work […]