Literary Life

Banned books, bad puffs, and fictional goodies all feature in Mark Sanderson's survey of the literary world

The Huffington Post recently revealed some of the bizarre reasons why certain books have been banned from American libraries. The Merriam Webster Dictionary’s inclusion of sexual terms caused some people to get their knickers in a twist and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was deemed to have cast Uncle Sam in a negative light. Roald Dahl’s The Witches was accused of sexism and of devaluing a child’s life; Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was judged to be pro-Communist; and William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble attracted heat for portraying policeman as (real) pigs. However, the weirdest reason for blacklisting a book was pure coincidence: Bill Martin Jr, one of the authors of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, happens to share his name with an obscure Marxist theorist.

Tony & Susan, a novel by Austin Wright, was first published in 1993 when it attracted rave reviews but, alas, sank without trace. Atlantic Books, which will be reissuing the novel next month, quotes various luminaries on the press release: 'Marvellously written – Saul Bellow’; 'Creepy, illuminating, quite wonderful – Donna Leon’; 'It shocked me and I’m not easily shocked’ – Ruth Rendell. However, MJ Hyland, whose Carry Me Down was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, considered it 'a f------ masterpiece.’ There’s eloquence for you.

It is good to see that the Great Recession has not impinged on the palm-fringed island of Mauritius. Le Prince Maurice Prize for Literary Love Stories is still in existence eight years on: the three books on the shortlist this year are East of the Sun by Julia Grigson, Small Wars by Sadie Jones and Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe. Money can lose its value but the winner will enjoy an indelible two-week stay at the five-star resort that gives the award its name.

Michiko Kakutani, chief reviews hatchet-wielder on the New York Times, was typically underwhelmed by Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar: 'As for the book’s final scenes…they feel oddly perfunctory and rushed: an unsatisfying ending to what is ultimately one of the immensely talented Mr McEwan’s decidedly lesser efforts.’ Clearly the sun wasn’t shining when she wrote her review.

Forget Marxism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis: the next big thing in English studies could well be cognitive theory. Magnetic Resonance Imaging is being used to gauge the effect that reading fiction has on the brain. Professor William Flesch calls fictional heroes – Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot – 'altruistic punishers’, people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. 'To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation,’ Professor Flesch told the NY Times, 'nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage’ at cheaters. Our enjoyment stems from seeing them punished. 'It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction, but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.’

The Urban Dictionary has cleverly defined what misguided technophiles believe will eventually be replaced by e-books: 'tree-books’.