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Which works of fiction since 2000 will stand the test of time? BBC Culture polled several dozen critics to select the greatest.
Jane Ciabattari
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Jane Ciabattari’s Journalist Portfolio
View as a grid'Thirteen Ways' Takes A Powerful, Layered Look At Life
NPR
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Colum McCann's first story collection since his novel Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award makes it clear that his work is growing ever more textured and timely - and he has few contemporary parallels as a storyteller. The collection's title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." "The first is hidden high in a mahogany bookcase," McCann writes in the first sentence of the title novella. It's not a bird he's describing, but a camera, eyeing the full expanse of the bedroom where Eliot Mendelssohn lies sleeping.
'Mothers' Tells Stories Too Often Silenced
NPR
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Bonnie Jo Campbell burst upon the literary landscape in 2009 with a collection called American Salvage that was raw and resonant, telling stories of the Rust Belt with frankness and an infinite patience for the voices of those whose stories are often left untold. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award. And now she's back, after a novel ( Once Upon a River, an updated female Huck Finn tale) with an even stronger collection.
Five Books Making News This Week: Prizes, Presidents, and Pond Philosophers
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Another banner week for literary culture passes. Marlon James celebrates his Man Booker award by writing about his hero, Toni Morrison. The National Book Awards announces twenty finalists. The Kirkus Book Prizes ($50,000 each) go to Pam Muñoz Ryan's Echo, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. Coates' book has already made news several times, as has Yanagihara's. Both are on the National Book Award shortlists. Meanwhile, the winner of a first book award writes a surpassing second. An editor, poet and memoirist gathers critical acclaim for her new novel about, yes, competing for prizes.
Five Books Making News This Week
lithub.com
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The sultry dog days of 2015 have been marked by a surprising and distinct quickening of attention in the literary world. July has brought us the Harper Lee phenomonon, Ta-Nehisi Coates' eloquent Between the World and Me, and an outpouring of praise upon the death of E.L. Doctorow. This week's upwelling of critical enthusiasm has been driven by the publication of the fifth volume in National Book Award winning William Vollmann's massive "Seven Dreams" cycle, a renaissance of interest in the work of the legendary Clarice Lispector, a spotlight on a novelist on the newly released Man Booker longlist and a couple of new books reflecting the darker side of our digital lives.
The 11 greatest children's books
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
2015's best beach reads
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
Ten books to read in June
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
Ten books to read in May
bbc.com
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From novels to a collection of essays on Nasa, the month brings many new titles worth cracking open, writes Jane Ciabattari.
Ten books to read in April
bbc.com
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From novels to collections of essays and short stories, the month brings a literary bounty. These titles should sit on your shelf, writes Jane Ciabattari.
Ten books to read in March
bbc.com
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The first novel in 10 years from Kazuo Ishiguru, a reimagining of Wuthering Heights and other reads Jane Ciabattari says should sit on your bookshelf.
A Haunting, Victorian-Inflected Dystopia In 'The Mime Order'
NPR
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The Bone Season, the first in Samantha Shannon's intoxicating urban-fantasy series set in 2059 in Scion (a dystopian version of England), ended with young Paige Mahoney escaping from a penal colony in the secret city of Oxford. Her Rephaim masters - immortals who feed upon the auras and blood of human clairvoyants like her - were in hot pursuit. The Mime Order opens with Paige on a train back to the Scion citadel of London, wounded and bleeding after leading her uprising. Within hours, she is the most hunted outlaw "voyant" in the land, her face flashed on massive screens in Orwellian fashion.
Ten books to read in February
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collections Stealing the Fire and California Tales.
New Year's reading resolutions
bbc.com
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Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, published between 1913 and 1927, is often on quite a few "Books I promise to read this year” lists. It tops my round-up of classic books andauthors you really should explore in the coming year. Proust’s masterpiece is daunting, yes. But you owe it to yourself to read it.
Ten books to read in 2015
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
The 10 best books of 2014
bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
A New Collection, Well-Furnished With Munro's Best
NPR
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Selected Stories, 1995-2014 Hardcover, 576 pages | purchase The citation for Alice Munro's 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature calls her "the master of the contemporary short story" and praises her ability to "say more in thirty words than an ordinary novel is capable of in three hundred." Munro distills into one story the sweep of a lifetime, with all its sorrows, disappointments and glories. Her work spans the 20th century, but her focus is on ordinary people (mostly in Canada) whose responses to love, lust, seeking community and facing tragedy range from magisterial to frail to vindictive.
Dylan Thomas: Rock 'n' roll poet
www.bbc.com
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Dylan Thomas, whose centenary is on 27 October, was a prodigy who became a living legend, the first poet to be magnified by celebrity culture - his words, voice, image and private life broadcast on an international scale through the 20th Century's new media of radio, television, film and audio recordings. "Dylan Thomas's voice has added a new dimension to literary history," the New York Times raved when he launched a US reading tour in 1950. "He will surely be remembered as the first in modern literature to be both a maker and speaker of poetry...
The Stories In 'Bright Shards' Glimmer With Empathetic Power
NPR
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Bright Shards of Someplace Else is Monica McFawn's first collection of short stories, and it's already won this year's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Perhaps it was her idiosyncratic voice, or her flair for distinctive characters that the judges recognized. Or maybe it was her empathetic power. Either way, McFawn has talent. In these 11 stories she manages to range from fantastic to satiric to poignant. The first piece, "Out of the Mouths of Babes," is about Grace, a loopy nanny whose new charge is a 9-year-old boy with eczema.
Is Borges the 20th Century's most important writer?
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Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in the musical scale. His friend and sometime collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares called his writings "halfway houses between an essay and a story". They are fictions filled with private jokes and esoterica, historiography and sardonic footnotes. They are brief, often with abrupt beginnings. Borges' use of labyrinths, mirrors, chess games and detective stories creates a complex intellectual landscape, yet his language is clear, with ironic undertones.
'The Kills' Sustains Suspense Across A Massive Structure
NPR
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Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Hardcover, 1002 pages | purchase Richard House's thriller The Kills, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year, weighs in at 1,024 pages. It's a long read, and worth every minute. House begins with a ferocious image - a Mason jar of dead scorpions, delivered to a British contractor in Iraq. He sees movement in the jar; the ginger scorpions have revived. "With a certain horror he raised the glass to the light and noticed how the smaller scorpions struggled to burrow and hide under the larger bodies, and this seemed strange to him, how something naturally armored would see the security of cover."
The 10 best new books to read
www.bbc.com
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About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
The French Riviera: 'A sunny place for shady people'
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F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton and Somerset Maugham show the shady side of the French Riviera. Between the Lines | 11 July 2014 About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire. Writers like Fitzgerald, Nabokov and Wharton have all perfectly captured the beauty and corruption of the French Riviera.
Whodunnit? Crime writers to read now
www.bbc.com
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As the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival begins, Jane Ciabattari picks 10 masters of the genre who should be on your bookshelf.
About the author Jane Ciabattari is a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who has written for The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the Paris Review. She is a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, having served as its president from 2008-11, and is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.