The Malaysian Insider :: Books

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes dies

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:03:19 GMT

MEXICO CITY, May 16 — Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, one of the Spanish-speaking world's best known novelists, died here Tuesday, President Felipe Calderon said. He was 83. "I profoundly regret the death of our dear and admired Carlos Fuentes, writer and universal Mexican. May he rest in peace," Calderon said on his Twitter account. Local media ...

Holocaust novel wins British foreign fiction prize

Mon, 14 May 2012 23:37:44 GMT

LONDON, May 15 — The tale of an 11-year-old boy hidden from the Nazis by a prostitute has won a fiction prize which celebrates writing translated into English. "Blooms of Darkness" by 80-year old Israeli Aharon Appelfeld was awarded the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize at a ceremony in London. It tells the story of Hugo, who is brought by ...

A pedal-powered Malaysian adventure

Sat, 12 May 2012 03:38:26 GMT

PETALING JAYA, May 12 — Long scenic stretches of padi fields, little-known local delicacies, rolling hills and the cooling breeze on your face as you cycle under an azure sky dotted with puffy clouds. That was part of what Sandra Loh, author of "Pedalling Around The Peninsula - A Malaysian Girl's Two-Wheeled Adventures" experienced during her ...

Book Review - PKFZ: A Nation’s Trust Betrayed

Sat, 12 May 2012 02:59:03 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR, May 12 — Which is the biggest financial scandal in Malaysian history, someone recently asked me. Without hesitation, I replied, Port Klang Free Zone or PKFZ. This scandal could potentially end up costing the Malaysian taxpayer RM12.5 billion according to the PWC position review report. In real terms, the financial losses associated ...

Amazon conjures rights to borrow Harry Potter ebooks

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:27:19 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 — Amazon said yesterday it has signed a deal for the electronic books rights to all seven Harry Potter titles in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish for its Kindle lending library. The deal allows subscribers of the Amazon Prime service, which requires an annual subscription, to borrow the electronic versions of ...

Book Talk: Sissy Spacek on a ‘fulfilling’ career

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:03:12 GMT

NEW YORK, May 10 – A faint hint of a Texas accent comes through when Sissy Spacek calls up to talk about her new memoir. Spacek, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” grew up in a small town, Quitman, Texas, in the 1950s and 1960s, a formative period that imbued her acting roles with “an ...

Voyage to the ‘front line’ of global warming

Tue, 08 May 2012 23:51:24 GMT

HONG KONG, May 9 — When Cameron Dueck set sail to the Canadian Arctic to witness what he calls "the front line of climate change", he did so knowing he would have to brave seas that have killed scores of sailors and reduced men to cannibals. For 450 years before the first successful voyage in 1906, people sought the Northwest Passage, a ...

‘Where the Wild Things Are’ author Maurice Sendak dies

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:08:13 GMT

NEW YORK, May 8 — American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, whose children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” has been a standard bedtime story for at least three generations, has died at the age of 83. Sendak died during the night at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut from complications from a recent stroke, a hospital spokesperson said today. ...

Ramone memoir reveals charming, grumpy punk icon

Mon, 07 May 2012 23:45:04 GMT

NEW YORK, May 8 — Johnny Ramone, guitarist for seminal punk band the Ramones, pioneered a fast, no-nonsense sound that made him one of the most influential guitarists of all time. "Commando: the Autobiography of Johnny Ramone," released nearly 8 years after Ramone, born John Cummings, died of prostate cancer at age 55, reads like a Ramones song: ...

Spoofs take steam out of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:33:49 GMT

LOS ANGELES, May 6 — Spanking, sex and submission are raking in profits for erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey”, reinvigorating marriages and sparking anguished debates among feminists, but there has been one unintended result of the novel — laughter. The best-selling book by British writer E.L. James that has taken pop culture by storm also has ...

Uggie, canine movie star, to ‘write’ book

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:53:34 GMT

NEW YORK, May 5 — Uggie, canine star of the Oscar-winning film "The Artist," is to put paw to paper and come out with an autobiography about his dramatic rise from condemned dog to Hollywood darling."Uggie — my story" is due to be published by Simon & Schuster's Gallery Books in October this year.According to the publishers, the trick-performing ...

My own private ‘Eat, Pray, Love’

Fri, 04 May 2012 04:25:52 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR, May 4 — “But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months … to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? … And then to do it again the next day?” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat, Pray, Love” EAT/Napoli, September 2002 This is the most alarmingly tasty slice ...

Political genius heart of Johnson biographer Caro

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:43:04 GMT

WASHINGTON, April 30 — Robert Caro has spent almost 40 years writing his monumental prize-winning biography of President Lyndon Johnson, but says it is not the 1960s leader that held his fascination for so long, but how political power works in America. With the long-awaited fourth volume of his Johnson biography “The Passage of Power” due out ...

Nobel laureate Pamuk opens physical ‘Museum of Innocence’

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:36:52 GMT

ISTANBUL, April 28 – Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk yesterday inaugurated a museum based on his last book about an obsessive lover who collects things to remind him of his inamorata and soothe the pain of a doomed affair. Pamuk said his 2008 oeuvre “The Museum of Innocence,” which took several years to write, came about while he was ...

Smart dragon tops list of fiction’s richest characters

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:41:09 GMT

LOS ANGELES, April 27 — A smart and savvy dragon, an aged vampire and a Beverly Hillbilly are among the richest fictional characters, according to a new ranking. Smaug, a hyper-intelligent, short-tempered dragon and the star of the upcoming “Lord of the Rings” prequel whose estimated worth is a hefty US$62 billion (RM188.9 billion), headed the ...

Book Talk: 15 cars that shaped American life

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:21:56 GMT

NEW YORK, April 26 – Author and journalist Paul Ingrassia is a passionate car buff who covered the automobile industry for more than 25 years, working for the Wall Street Journal and winning both a Pulitzer Prize and Gerald Loeb Award with Joseph B. White in 1993. In his new book, “Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen ...

Jews welcome first annotated ‘Mein Kampf’ in Germany

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:37:42 GMT

BERLIN, April 26 — Germany’s Jewish community yesterday welcomed a landmark decision to republish Adolf Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” for the first time since World War II, in an annotated edition. The southern state of Bavaria, which holds the rights, has not permitted reprints of the vicious anti-Semitic tract and rambling memoir since the ...

Hitler’s Mein Kampf may return to Bavarian schools

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:53:05 GMT

BERLIN, April 25 – The German state of Bavaria is considering publishing a book with excerpts from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for use in schools after its legal power to ban the book expires in 2016. The Bavarian state finance ministry in southern Germany owns the copyright to the book, which sets out the Nazi vision of Aryan racial supremacy, and has ...

Award-winning novel sells over 2 million in South Korea

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:46:18 GMT

SEOUL, April 25 — "Please Look After Mom", a novel of family love and loss by award-winning author Kyung-Sook Shin, has sold more than two million copies in her homeland South Korea, the publisher said Tuesday. Lee Sang-Sul, director at publisher Changbi, said only two other novels since the 1990s had sold more than two million in South Korea, "so ...

Review of Student Activism in Malaysia

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:35:03 GMT

APRIL 24 — This is a fascinating book, which provides a detailed account of student activism in Malaysia, with its rise and demise, from the early twentieth century to more recent times. Beyond that, it provides a considerable amount of information about the development of Malayan and Malaysian politics and, to a lesser extent, Singapore politics ...

Maori Troilus and Cressida opens Shakespeare season

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:59:52 GMT

LONDON, April 23 — A festival bringing together 37 companies from around the world to perform Shakespeare’s 37 plays in different languages kicks off at London’s Globe theatre today with a Maori version of “Troilus and Cressida”. The initiative, called Globe to Globe, is part of a wider World Shakespeare Festival as well as the London 2012 ...

Book reveals hidden horror of N.Korean labour camps

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:14:25 GMT

LONDON, April 23 — “Escape From Camp 14” makes for grim reading. Journalist Blaine Harden’s account of a young man’s life in and escape from a labour camp in secretive North Korea has drawn parallels with the Soviet gulags and Nazi Holocaust. One big difference is that North Korea’s political prison camps, holding an estimated 200,000 people and ...

New US literary tourism: Read it, watch it, live it

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:15:42 GMT

CHARLOTTE (North Carolina), April 23 — Fans of “The Hunger Games” will soon have a chance to channel the survivalist spirit of the novel’s heroine by zip-lining through a North Carolina forest and taking classes in camouflage, archery, making fire and shelter-building. The woodsy, adrenalin-pumping experiences move beyond traditional tourism for ...

Poles snap up Szymborska’s posthumous volume of poems

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:37:57 GMT

WARSAW, April 21— A posthumous collection of poems by Poland’s Nobel literature laureate Wislawa Szymborska went on sale yesterday, selling out within hours at several bookstores in the capital. The collection, titled “Wystarczy” (Enough), features 13 poems Szymborska had composed shortly before her death in February at the age of 88, Malgorzata ...

J.K. Rowling at work on Harry Potter encyclopaedia

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 08:45:07 GMT

LONDON, April 21 — Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is planning to pen a long-anticipated encyclopaedia covering the universe of her best-selling series, according to comments she made in the FAQ section of her newly relaunched website. “For a long time I have been promising an encyclopaedia of Harry’s world, and I have started work on this — some ...

Penn, Rushdie, Fry attend Christopher Hitchens memorial

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:18:25 GMT

NEW YORK, April 21 — Actors Sean Penn and Stephen Fry, novelist Salman Rushdie and dozens of other friends paid tribute to Christopher Hitchens yesterday in a New York memorial service held four months after his death. Vanity Fair magazine, for which the British-born journalist worked, said that popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s including “Both ...

John Grisham on America’s summer sport

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:17:05 GMT

NEW YORK, April 20 — Bursting into the US national baseball consciousness in the summer of 1973, a rookie named Joe Castle endears himself to spectators and opposing teams as he smashes records while maintaining his own small town sense of wonder with the game. “Calico Joe” is the 25th novel from prolific author John Grisham, 57, and though set ...

Nordic twist at Budapest Book Festival

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:51:59 GMT

BUDAPEST, April 19 – Budapest’s 19th International Book Festival, one of the biggest in central Europe, opened today featuring popular Nordic writers as this year’s guests of honour. More than 20 northern European writers will attend the four-day event in the Hungarian capital, including award-winning Swedish crime novelist Hakan Nesser, Norway’s ...

Amazon buys rights to Bond books

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 01:42:46 GMT

LOS ANGELES, April 19 — Ian Fleming’s series of bestselling books about James Bond, aka 007, the sleek British spy, portrayed in films by actors from Sean Connery to Craig Daniels, have been acquired by the mega book retailer Amazon, it was announced on April 17. Scooping up the North American rights, the relatively new publishing branch of ...

British Library buys Europe’s oldest book for £9m

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:26:52 GMT

LONDON, April 18 — The St Cuthbert gospel, Europe's oldest intact book, will remain in Britain after a record-breaking fundraising campaign by the British Library, it said Tuesday. Half of the £9 million (RM44 million) required to purchase the 7th Century copy of the Gospel of St John came from the The National Heritage Memorial Fund with ...

Three Americans up for Orange female fiction prize

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:16:53 GMT

LONDON, April 17 — Ann Patchett, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for female writers in 2002, was nominated again today with “State of Wonder”, her sixth novel. She was one of three US authors on a shortlist of six, including Cynthia Ozick, who turned 84 today and was the oldest nominee for the annual award. “My only regret is that the rules ...

Beard recounts personal torment in revealing book

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:04:26 GMT

NEW YORK, April 17 — When Amanda Beard climbed the podium at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, clutching her teddy bear as she collected her first gold medal, no one could see the torment that was starting to brew inside of her.Whenever she smiled, cameras clicked and crowds roared with approval. She was just 14 at the time and apparently living the ...

Price-fixing suit hits as eyes turn to e-books

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 07:01:43 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO, April 14 — E-books are the future of publishing, and the legal tangle launched Wednesday shows how high the stakes are in the fledgling but fast-growing industry. Unlike the music and film industries which struggled to harness the revenue potential as people devoured entertainment on computers or mobile gadgets, book publishers ...

JK Rowling’s first adult novel will be ‘blackly comic’

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:08:13 GMT

LONDON, April 13 — JK Rowling's first book for adults will be a "blackly comic" novel set in an idyllic English town where all is not what it seems, its publisher said on Thursday. The title of the closely guarded 480-page novel by the prolific "Harry Potter" author will be "The Casual Vacancy." It and will be available worldwide in English on ...

‘The Bloggess’ brings zany style to memoir

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:53:40 GMT

NEW YORK, April 13 — A taxidermist, a donkey named Jasper, and Teddy Roosevelt all walked into a bar in Texas. For anyone but award-winning blogger Jenny Lawson, this would sound like the beginning of a joke, but for her, it's just another incident from her life. In her debut novel, "Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)," ...

A galaxy full of princes

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:51:03 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR, April 13 — It’s no fun being a prince when you find you’re just one of 10 million others... who would all like you dead. That’s the premise for Garth Nix’s fantasy novel “Confusion of Princes”, a sci-fi novel targeted towards the Young Adults crowd but makes fine adult reading too if you like good writing. And this is good writing; ...

Hitler’s rise through American eyes

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:35:38 GMT

NEW YORK, April 12 — Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany is among the most written-about topics in modern history. But Andrew Nagorski, who for more than three decades was a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek magazine, explores a unique angle to the story in his new book: How did Americans living in Germany view Hitler and the ...

Oxford University, Vatican libraries to digitize works

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:22:48 GMT

LONDON, April 12 — The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) said on Thursday they intended to digitize 1.5 million pages of ancient texts and make them freely available online. The libraries said the digitized collections will centre on three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century ...

William Boyd to pen new Bond novel set in late 1960s

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:15:25 GMT

LONDON, April 12 — Suave and brutal British superspy James Bond will find himself in the thick of danger at the end of the swinging ’60s in a new, official novel by author William Boyd due out next year. The best-selling British novelist told Reuters today that he will put his knowledge of Cold War espionage to good use to pen the next adventure ...

Jazz musician Herbie Hancock to pen memoir

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:42:16 GMT

NEW YORK, April 11 — Jazz musician Herbie Hancock will reveal intimate details of his career in a memoir due for release in fall 2014, Viking Press said yesterday. Hancock, 71, has become a pioneering force in the jazz and blues music world, earning 14 Grammy awards and an Academy Award over his five-decade career, and seeing many of his songs ...

Stalin exercise books fly off shelves in Moscow

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 01:08:04 GMT

MOSCOW, April 9 — School exercise books decorated with an image of late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin bedecked with medals have become a top-seller at a Moscow store, prompting outrage from rights activists. “We had to restock the exercise books with the portrait of Stalin yesterday. They are selling very fast,” a spokeswoman for Dom Knigi book ...

Titanic books resurrect the story from stem to stern

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:41:36 GMT

LOS ANGELES, April 8 — With the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 2012, the compelling tragedy has prompted an array of books retelling the story of passengers aboard the world's biggest ship and recounting the haunting and enduring event. The iconic tale grips readers with its elements from dreams and luxury to terror and ...

Kee covers ground, but book does not advance discourse

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:39:04 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR, April 7 — “What has Malaysia turned into? The sordid set opera capital of the world?” — From “Who is the more immoral” in No more bullshit, please, we are all Malaysian. Kee Thuan Chye’s No more bullshit, please, we are all Malaysian reflects accurately both the title and the author’s passion for Malaysia. The collection of columns ...

‘Lover Reborn’ soars to top of bestsellers list

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:13:13 GMT

NEW YORK, April 6 — “Lover Reborn” jumped to the top of the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list yesterday. The list is compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide. Hardcover Fiction (last week) 1. “Lover Reborn” by J.R. Ward (NAL, US$27.95) (-) 2. “Guilty Wives” by James ...

Wyoming author C.J. Box returns with ‘force of nature’

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:19:07 GMT

NEW YORK, April 5 — Wyoming-based author C.J. Box has just released "Force of Nature," the 12th in his series of mysteries starring Joe Pickett, a game warden in the Bighorn Mountains."Force of Nature" features Pickett's longtime friend Nate Romanowski, a man with a secret past that comes back to haunt him and puts Pickett and his family in ...

In US, 20pc of adults now using e-books

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:55:35 GMT

WASHINGTON, April 5 — One in five American adults read an electronic book in the last year, as gift-giving sped the shift away from the printed page, a Pew Research Center survey showed yesterday. In a sweeping survey of e-books’ impact on reading habits, the Pew report said that four times more US readers, or 15 per cent, were reading e-books on ...

Tunisia’s ex-first lady to tell her ‘truth’ in memoir

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:49:30 GMT

TUNIS, April 5 — Leila Ben Ali, the wife of Tunisia’s ousted dictator, will publish a memoir of her life that is likely to stir controversy in the North African country where she was reviled by many as a latter-day Marie-Antoinette. Her book, to be published in French under the title “Ma Verite” or “My Truth”, appears on amazon.fr, the French ...

German author Grass says Israel endangers world peace

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:59:15 GMT

BERLIN, April 4 — Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that one German newspaper branded “anti-Semitic”. Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions ...

Witch trials and sleuthing in 1890s Maine

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:36:53 GMT

TOKYO, April 3 — When a prostitute is found stabbed through with a pitchfork in a ritualised death said to be a way of killing a witch, local marshal Archie Lean is forced to call on Perceval Grey, a half-Native American sleuth, for help. Set in the city of Portland, Maine in 1892, "The Truth of All Things" by debut novelist Kieran Shields follows ...

Author Shriver looks at terrorism with droll humour

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:30:51 GMT

NEW YORK, April 3 — International best-selling novelist Lionel Shriver's latest book is released on Thursday, but it isn't exactly new. She wrote it over 10 years ago. "The New Republic" follows Shriver's best-selling works like "The Post-Birthday World" as well as "We Need to Talk About Kevin," the 2011 movie starring Tilda Swinton for which she ...