My Best Books

The 1692 Massacre of Glencoe can still rouse passions today, so it’s a brave author who tries to wrest fiction from it. In her third novel, Susan Fletcher approaches the massacre using two main characters, one historical, the other semi-legendary. What emerges is very much a literary, rather than a traditional historical, novel.

This morning, I started my day in the local Pret A Manger huddled over a skinny latte and a gay porn magazine called Butt. I can’t think of many porn mags, gay or straight, that I’d be happy to read at 8.30am in Pret, if at all. But then Butt, with its apparently unpretentious Courier typeface, small format and smiling cover boy isn’t really like the rest. Did I mention that it’s printed on blushing pink paper too?

The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archives of writer David Foster Wallace, announced the center on March 9. Highlights of the collection, some of which can now be viewed online, include handwritten notes and drafts, research, and teaching materials owned by the Infinite Jest author, who died in 2008.

Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, as in the French writer Lydie Salvayre’s other novels, treats us to a meditative work of fiction narrated by someone trying to find their foothold in the void. This time, Salvayre’s void is high finance and the “free market”. An unnamed female narrator has agreed to write the authorised biography of the richest man in the world, a fast-food magnate called Tobold the Hamburger King.

The Jacobean tastes of Alfred Hitchcock, that working-class Englishman, have wormed their way into the cultural mainstream. Especially with Psycho, a film with a wavering sense of near-farce saved by the most brilliant musical score in movie history, by Bernard Herrmann. Go to see Martin Scorsese’s new film, Shutter Island; you’ll find Leonardo DiCaprio taking a shower. The shower head, a fully referenced Psycho flower of radiating water, is like an advancing medical instrument in an alien laboratory.

They arrived from every corner of the country. They were from men women and children, of every race, age, class and calling. Half a century on, they have come to life again, expressing Americans’ grief, shock and collective sense of bereavement at the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination.

It’s 11.45am and the Central Hall in Westminster is heaving with yakking schoolkids. Fifteen-year-olds, with iPods, notebooks and temporarily customised uniforms, file up the stairs chattering like jackdaws, as though at a hip-hop gig.

It’s almost 62 years since the “nakba” or cataclysm that saw the invasion of Palestine or, to put it another way, the founding of the state of Israel.

Kevin Anderson’s Night of the Living Trekkies is set to be published by Quirk Books, announced industry resource Publishers Lunch on March 4. Due out in September 2010, the mash-up novel, “mixing a zombie apocalypse with the enduring mythology of Star Trek,” will join such Quirk Books titles as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Android Karenina.