The next big thing?

 

Keeping up with the next best thing can be an exhausting business. Writers, readers, broadcasters and journalists are ready to crown the new great talents in an effort to look authoritative and influential, fuelled by more than a smidge of desperation. After all, no one wants to be the one who let the latest and greatest slip by without their noticing. What’s left after the hype and frenzy has dissipated is another matter.

Books for Valentine’s Day and beyond

AJ Jacobs is a man on a mission, again. After reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an effort to become the smartest man alive (as documented in his book The Know-It-All) and living a life without lying, he’s gone biblical. Not just Ten Commandments biblical, but following every law and decree in the Old and New Testaments. Some of this is easy (no eating owls, for instance), some inconvenient (not wearing mixed fibres) and others not just difficult, but potentially illegal (stoning adulterers, for one). The results are published in The Year of Living Biblically and show Dave Gorman and Morgan Spurlock for the half-hearted charlatans they are.

Six months after it charmed, delighted and wowed almost every American critic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is at last published in Britain. The story of a family from the Dominican Republic who’ve settled in Brooklyn and the Tolkien-obsessed, nerdish and obese Oscar. By turns dark, sad and gleefully exuberant, the story is held together by a curious mangling and mashing of language as inspired by Dominican folklore as it is by Doctor Who. The debut novel of short story writer Junot Diaz is one of the most original American novels in years and a much-needed challenge to the hegemony of Updike, Roth and DeLillo.

Originality is also in abundance in British fiction. Like Robert Harris’s The Ghost, Gordon Burn continues to blend fact and fiction in his work (having previously written about Peter Sutcliffe and Myra Hindley) by looking at the British media and its interplay with politics. Born Yesterday is set in the dramatic summer of last year, a time of flux at the top, failed terror attacks, flooding and a missing toddler – all themes and issues still trundling on months later.

On a less grand note, James Collins is gaining a lot of attention for his debut. While some are impressed by his deft plotting, fresh approach and combination of wit and romance, others content themselves with raising eyebrows over a man writing “chick lit”. Regardless, Beginner’s Greek is a tale of love and destiny which unfolds after a Wall Street banker and a Classics teacher meet on a plane and everything conspires to keep them apart.

From the bright young things to the embarrassingly irrelevant. Martin Amis aims to kill his credibility once and for all with his collection of journalism about the events of September 11th. His writing on “Islamofacism” is bombastic and deeply unpleasant, fuelled by ignorance and an unrivalled sense of self-importance, it might have been better called “I’m not racist but…” For a more insightful view on the world since 2001, Robert Fisk is also publishing a collection of his columns, The Age of the Warrior while Michael Burleigh gives us his cultural history of terrorism in Blood and Rage.

And finally, the dreaded VD. Whether celebrating or consoling, Penguins Great Loves are a good bet for February 14th. No “I wuv woo” banalities here, the 20-strong series celebrates the anguish, pain and passion of love with authors as diverse as Hardy, Kierkegaarde and Chekhov and the same price as a couple of wilting roses reeking of the petrol station they were bought from.

The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens

Given Christopher Hitchens’ ability to infuriate, befuddle and offend, you wonder who’s still buying his books. A strident proponent of the Iraq war, in print Hitchens has also scalped Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. Here he returns with his third book this year, a companion to his anti-religion polemic God Is Not Great.

Living with obsession: Veronica, Mary Gaitskill

Veronica is a novel of symbiosis – beauty and cruelty, glamour and decay, Veronica and Alison. In this tale told in the present day but focused firmly on the 1980s, Alison thinks back over a life of fleeing those who need her, running even as she clings to them.

Homer, Byron, Brand?

There are many famous books that never were. Homer wrote a lost epic, Byron’s memoirs were destroyed after his death and Sylvia Plath never lived to complete her second novel. Now to this illustrious list we can (possibly) add Russell Brand’s Booky Wook. At time of writing, his autobiography hadn’t been completed, leading to Brand pulling out of the presitigious Cheltenham Festival. As Hodder and Stoughton draw their collective breath, here’s some titles looking more definite.

Before the onslaught: reading for Autumn

The finest slither in the publishing calendar, Autumn bridges the gap between lightweight beach reads and the conveyor belt of ghostwritten celebrity bilge that threatens to ruin every Christmas. The following are all you need to sustain you until November when the first of seven Lewis Hamilton biographies will finally reveal what he’s been up to for his first 21 years.

Model behaviour: What Will Survive, Joan Smith

The year 1997, with Blair’s rise, Cool Britannia and the death of Princess Diana, provides a fertile backdrop to What Will Survive, a novel that centres around the death in Lebanon of model-turned-landmine ac