Books

These two books are about aliens – intelligent beings who may or may not have visited our planet. Jonathan Caplan is a distinguished lawyer and believer; David Lavelle is a journalist and skeptic. Aliens have always been with us. For at least 4,000 years there have been reports of strange visitations assumed to come from heaven, hell or simply the universe. Angels and demons were commonplace, but they were eventually replaced by technology-based visions, most often flying saucers. These could be quietly ignored until 1947, when postwar alien fever was sparked in Roswell, New Mexico. Metal and rubber debris were found which the US Army initially claimed were parts of a “flying disc.

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: "Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not 'What is that bird?' but 'Who is that bird?' The aim is to help readers identify with them.

In the realm of magic and imagination, human nature can be better understood than in the world of our everyday lives: “The best of our tales do not lie or die.” It is a bold claim, which the folklorist Jack Zipes explores across continents and class in a series of essays. He guides the reader from the origin of oral storytelling, through medieval writings, to 17th-century literary salons and finally to today’s cinema screens. In the course of this journey, he focuses on the specific genre of the “wonder tale,” in which “those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognize the wondrous signs... They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism.

To pinpoint the precise moment Ernest Hemingway came up with the idea for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which is celebrating its centenary this year, is not difficult. All we have to do is follow the trail back to Pamplona. In 1925, after a cold winter in Paris, a 25-year-old Hemingway was keen to return to the San Fermín bullfighting festival in the Basque town of Pamplona, near the northern coast of Spain. He had yet to make his mark as a writer, although he was surrounded by some of the heavyweights of expatriate literature: Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford, all of whom believed Hem had a future as a novelist.

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change association football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: “It matters more when there’s money on it.” For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. “It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalization of gambling in football,” writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t amusing. Often found in these pages, Rod Liddle, for one, is very funny, though I suggest he’d balk at being called a conservative. And Donald Trump is hilarious on Truth Social – his posts may have the subtlety of a bullhorn, but they usually land with a satisfying thunk. During his 2016 campaign and well into his first term, Trump succeeded in part because he understood that politics and entertainment run in parallel.

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favorite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.