Stephen King at his home in Maine, US. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian Why do male authors still dominate our book reviews pages? This week, the Stella Count was released – Australia's equivalent of the US's highly publicised VIDA results. The statistics, revealing how many books by men and women were reviewed in our major newspapers and literary magazines, highlight a striking disproportion, and you can read my analysis of the disparity in the results here.
A fascinating examination of the history of publishing innovations consders how entrepreneurs such as Penguin founder Allen Lane would have reveled in the opportunities of the digital revolution. “Lane's brainwave was the biggest single book innovation of the 20th century, and in its day the equal of the ebook. For a while, his idea dominated the market. Households across Britain began sprouting those colour-coded spines. A format that at the outset seemed to threaten vested interests became an object of veneration.” Read Robert McCrumb on what Allen Lane would have made of Amazon.
"After writing a novel what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots and so on. I'd much rather listen always." In a beautiful interview, Richard Flanagan talks to Michael Williams over dinner, discussing his relationship with his father through his new work, his discomfort with the literary establishment, and his new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which the figure of Weary Dunlop looms large over the book. "Dunlop is too extraordinary a character for fiction. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions," he says.
William Boyd climbs into the interviewer's chair – and back in time – this week as he interrogates the subject of his latest book, Solo, secret agent 007, James Bond. "It was strange being back in Chelsea in 1969, the year of the moon-landing, the year of my first summer in London. Stranger still to be going to interview James Bond," he writes as he walks us through London to Bond's flat. "The door was opened by a rather severe-looking young woman with her brown hair styled in a schoolmarm's sexless bob. I introduced myself and said I had an appointment to interview Mr Bond for the Guardian newspaper. 'I'm afraid we don't take the Guardian, here,' the young woman said in a strong Scottish accent. I said I would make sure a copy reached Mr Bond, somehow."
In our Guardian Books Podcast we’re joined this week by Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri who talks about her collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, her favourite short story authors and the challenge of writing from the male perspective. This week was Banned Books Week so we asked readers to send us a photo of their favourite censored books. View our gallery of readers’ favourite banned titles from JD Salinger to Henry Miller.
A book whose “deepest shiverings depend on no made-up devils,” Stephen King’s anticipated new work Doctor Sleep is a sequel to one of his most disturbing novels, The Shining. It follows Dan Torrance, the little boy from the first novel, now grown up. Stephen Poole reviews the latest book from an author who has “grudgingly been admitted by lit-crit folk into the ranks of ‘actually good writers’ as opposed to mere megaselling dimestore artists.” (And if you missed the Guardian's interview with King, you can catch up here)
“The race is now on to write the Worst. Book. Ever. And this may be it.” Lucy Ellmann skewers Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland, a work with a “total immersion in the banality it purports to expose.” It may be a critique of mass culture, “but if this book is satirical, it hides it well. An ironic hamburger is still (usually) a hamburger.”
In a similarly “good bad review” in our non-fiction section, Geoff Dyer applies his biting tongue to The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong by Guido Mina di Sospiro: the story of a man's deepening love of ping-pong with philosophical ruminations about the nature of the game. “And remember the match-winning point of the book: what we discover about spin in ping-pong can be found in 'other fields too'. Not in Mina di Sospiro's writing though. His prose is so lacking in spin and bounce the half-awake reader can see where a sentence is headed before it's left the author's pen.”
By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY
Why it's hot: Books about Lincoln's assassination still fascinate — see Bill O'Reilly's best seller. In his new novel, Carter draws on his expertise both as constitutional scholar and as the author of four best-selling thrillers including The Emperor of Ocean Park.A taste: "He had been shot on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he had risen. By the middle of the week, the President was sitting up, meeting with his staff, once again in charge of the affairs of the nation."On sale: July 10The authorQuick bio: A professor at Yale Law School since 1982, Carter, 57, has also written eight non-fiction books, most recently The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama. He and his wife have two grown children.His inspiration: The idea of writing a "what if" Lincoln book has been in "the back of my head" since Carter was an undergrad. The man from Springfield has fascinated Carter since elementary school when he would flip through his father's copy of Carl Sandburg's multi-volume Lincoln biography. Today Carter has a bookshelf filled with Lincoln books in his Connecticut house.Lincoln impeached? On what grounds? Lincoln is our greatest president, says Carter, "but because he faced a greater crisis than any other president, he did things that, in the light of history, don't look very good." Things such as suspending habeas corpus, shutting down newspapers and putting northern cities under martial law.Would Lincoln have succeeded in politics today? "Not a chance. He would been been dismissed as uneducated and too folksy. He was not very telegenic and had a funny voice."Any plans to see the summer movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? "I don't know. It sounds like enormously silly fun," but he doubts his wife will agree.Up next: A historical novel about the Cuban missile crisis.His summer reading:An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen; Attica Locke's The Cutting Season, a mystery set in Louisiana; andBourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskey.E-books or print? "I read mostly print. I love the feel of the books."For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.