This week’s trawl of the web produces reviews of a couple of biographies, three posthumous books of fiction, two new novels from Orham Pamuk and Barbara Kingsolver and Salman Rushdie on the brilliance of the author interviews at the heart of The Paris Review.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Kicking off the week is a new biography of everyone’s favourite arch-conservative Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller. When I worked in a secondhand bookshop Rand was the favourite of pretty young ladies whose mothers had raved about how Atlas Shrugged had changed their lives back in the day. Problem is as Adam Kirsch points out in his review of the biography in The New York Times: “This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly­wood screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity.” You see, she writes terribly but believed bitterly in her hardcore iron-lady message to the folks that didn’t do flower power. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Next up is a double review of two recent books about Lev Davidovich Bronstein (or plain old Leon Trotsky) by Tariq Ali for The Guardian. One by Robert Service gets little applause from Ali who writes that “The Service view can be summarised in a sentence: Trotsky was a ruthless and cold-blooded murderer and deserves to be exposed as such.” The other book which concentrates more on Trotsky’s period of exile in Mexico and his assasination there, Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky by Bertrand M Patenaude gets more encouragement with Ali declaring that, “Patenaude’s shorter and much better written book is far more objective and, in fact, more scholarly.”

Also on the subject of biographies is this long appreciation from The Guardian by Ian Jack of the wonders of Diana Athill who after a prestigious publishing career, began publishing her much acclaimed memoirs in her 80s and has become a bestselling author at the age of 91. Jack, a great writer in his own right and former editor of Granta, suggests that,”If anyone in future wants to know how an intelligent Englishwoman led her life in the 20th century, her inner and outer life, from birth to a very old age, hers are books that will need to be read.”

Not quite straight biography but all about writers is the collected author interviews from The Paris Review which Salman Rushide in The Times celebrates because, “They don’t just entertain you, they also make you think, and they even make you rethink what you think you know. Like many writers (and would-be writers, and readers, too), I’ve been a fan of the Art of Fiction series for as long as I can remember.”

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

Three posthumous works of s of fiction by three heavyweight authors also get their just reviews this week.

Dave Eggers writing in the NYT looks at Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories and likes them: “The 14 stories in “Look at the Birdie,” none of them afraid to entertain, dabble in whodunnitry, science fiction and commanding fables of good versus evil. Why these stories went unpublished is hard to answer. They’re polished, they’re relentlessly fun to read, and every last one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end. For transmittal of moral instruction, they are incredibly efficient delivery devices.”

Then there’s Raymond Carver’s Beginners a reconstruction of his 1988 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love- demonstrating the extent of the relationship between Carver and his editor Gordon Lish and showing that Carer’s raw stories were significantly less pared down than their published versions. The book is endorsed by Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher and in his review for The Telegraph, Tim Martin decides that: as even Carver well knew, Lish’s versions were frequently cleaner, more vigorous and more memorable than his originals. When he selected his favourite stories for the collection Where I’m Calling From, he chose to restore only three of his original versions while reprinting many of Lish’s edits in their entirety.”

Lastly Jane Smiley in The Guardian reviews Presence: The Collected Stories of Arthur Miller which he wrote most of them between 1959 and 1992 and “they hang together as a single volume owing to the consistency of his detailed and empathetic gaze.” Her only complaint is that there aren’t more of them.

NEW FICTION

Nobel Laureate Orham Pamuk returns with his latest, The museum of Innocence reviewed by Maureen Howard in the NYT who commends it and feels that “part of the delight in “The Museum of Innocence” is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling. He often makes use of genre, turns the expected response to his purpose.” There’s also a slideshow of 83 actual objects that are to form part of Pamuk’s museum which will compliment the 83 chapters of the book.

We profiled Barbara Kingsolver on Sunday and her new book The Lacuna which gets a lukewarm review from The Financial Times and a not completely convinced rating in The Times.

Related posts:

1. Podcast and reviews: A Fork in the Road by André Brink
2. Orhan Pamuk: Still Mad at Turkey
3. Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster
4. The Guardian’s List of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read
5. Profile Bonanza: Martin Amis, AS Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro