tom mccarthy – Three Percent

Man Booker Shortlist

Chad Post — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:25:32 +0000

The for this year’s Man Booker Prize was announced earlier today. Looks like a decent enough list, although I’m pretty surprised that the David Mitchell book didn’t make it . . . Anyway, here’s the full list, and I’m sure over the next few days there will be tons of articles and posts analyzing this list. (Seeing that I haven’t read a single one of these books—although I am looking forward to C and the Emma Donoghue book sounds kinda creepy—I don’t really have anything to say . . . )

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue, Room

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Andrea Levy, The Long Song

Tom McCarthy, C

Ready Steady Book's Books of the Year Symposium

Chad Post — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:10:15 +0000

Over at Mark Thwaite has posted the “Books of the Year 2008 symposium” featuring recommendations from a host of authors, translators, and reviewers, including Scott Esposito (who recommends Adolfo Bioy Casares and others), Charlotte Mandell (who is all about Flann O’Brien), her husband Robert Kelly (who recommends Littell’s The Kindly One, Marias’s Dark Back of Time, and Nadas’s The Book of Memories), and Tom McCarthy (whose only recommendation is Toussaint’s Camera) among others.

Definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re looking for good recommendations to kick off 2009.

Believer Book Award

Chad Post — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:44:59 +0000

In addition to the neverending recap of BEA, today seems to be a day of award news . . .

Specifically, Tom McCarthy won the fourth annual for his novel Remainder. (One of my favorite books of the past few years.)

“What’s the most intense, clear memory you have?” asks the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. “The one you can see even if you close your eyes—really see, clear as in a vision?” Dispensing with Proustian reminiscence, McCarthy brazenly assumes the role of conceptual artist and literally reconstructs moments of time. In the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy tells its story through architecture in book form, Remainder is an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.

Tom McCarthy's Latest

Chad Post — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:19:29 +0000

It’s not a translation, but Tom McCarthy is a young British writer I really like. His debut novel Remainder—originally published by before being picked up by Vintage here in the States—is quite impressive, mysterious, and captivating.

Scott Esposito at has more about the new book, Men in Space, which sounds very different from Remainder, although potentially interesting.

Men in Space follows a gaggle of characters set adrift within a fragmenting world: a stranded cosmonaut who has no country to come back to, a misguided football referee who has lost all perspective, an unsettled police agent, self-indulgent drifters seeking authenticity, political refugees and Western hangers-on who just don’t seem to grasp what is happening on the streets around them.