Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

In London last night, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award was presented to Rowan Somerville for a passage in his novel, The Shape of Her. Guess what he’s describing when he writes of the “nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing in the night”? If you guessed “nipple,” you’re right–and maybe you should nominate yourself [...]

The next year will bring a torrent of arresting literary memoirs, memoirs by writers about literary parents or husbands or near-relatives. Joyce Carol Oates remembers her late editor husband, Raymond Smith, in A Widow’s Story. Anne Roiphe chronicles her stint as muse to her unstable first husband in a forthcoming memoir. Gail Godwin sheds light [...]

Unless you’ve been dead the last few months, you probably know that Max Brooks’ rather brilliant novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) is being made into a movie. Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction, and the unfairly maligned Quantum of Solace), the movie stars Brad Pitt [...]

A quick roundup of the last week and a half before I don my camouflage coverall, smear my face with dirt, and go hunting for wild turkeys with my bare hands. Just kidding–who am I, Ted Nugent? Good old cranky Robert McCrum–why, he even scowls in his headshot! Last week, took books to task for ballooning [...]

I really don’t have anything against mash-ups. I loved Classic Comics as a kid, and only a few years ago I saw a version of King Lear at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre that was set in an unnamed Balkan country. Lear, played by Stacey Keach, was portrayed as a Slobodan Milosevic-like dictator ready to retire and [...]

Morning Glory, the new movie starring Rachel McAdams as a television producer, is getting solid reviews. There is, rather predictably, a tie-in novelization, but here’s the surprise: it’s a good book. “Novelization” is a sort of literary dirty word, used to describe books written from screenplays. As a general rule they’re badly written, with paper-thin [...]

A while back I alerted you to the impending movie adaptation of Ken Bruen’s excellent novel London Boulevard. The trailer is online, and it looks really good, appropriately stylish and violent. Check it out:

The National Book Awards ceremony was full of surprises, with Jaimy Gordon’s win the foremost. She was met with shocked silence from most of the audience, which mirrored her own reaction. In her speech she stated ”I am totally unprepared and I am totally surprised…” So, prepare yourselves, for the winners are: Fiction Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon [...]

Was Jane Austen a sloppy writer? That’s the claim made by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland, and she’s posted more than 1,000 pages of Austen manuscripts online that she says prove her point. In fact, Sutherland has concluded that Austen’s celebrated style is really the work of an unknown editor. The claim has generated  publicity and even controversy; in an NPR [...]

Three years ago, I made a public vow (well, it appeared on this blog, anyway) to read a book by Harlan Coben. I had read a profile of him in the Atlantic (“Paperback Writer,” by Eric Konigsberg) that, while not damning him as some have damned James Patterson, did portray Coben as being a guy who cared as [...]