Culture

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’ As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.

- Hong Kong South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin has become the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel Please Look After Mother, which tells the story of a family's heartbreaking search  for their mum after she goes missing from a Seoul subway station. During a black-tie dinner hosted at the Conrad hotel in Hong Kong, BBC Special Correspondent and chair of this year's judging  panel Razia Iqbal announced the winner of Asia's most prestigious prize for literature. She said the reason they chose Shin's book is because it is "an amazing story",  beautifully written and poignantly told,  through a compelling structure of different narrative voices.

It is, of course, entirely appropriate that the estate of Bram Stoker should choose to mark the 100th anniversary of the author’s death this year with a series of events, such as the publication of Bram Stoker’s Lost Journal, and a special edition of Dracula.    With other writers you might decide to commemorate their birth, or the date of their greatest work. But death — and in particular the way it needn’t stand in the way of a man’s career — was the underpinning theme of Bram Stoker’s most famous novel. And with the popularity of vampires at an all time high in the early years of 21st century, Stoker’s immortality seems just as assured as that of his most famous creation.

The political battle over library closures has intensified. Earlier this morning, shadow culture secretary Dan Jarvis chastised libraries minister Ed Vaizey for being the ‘Dr Beeching of libraries’. Jarvis said that Vaizey should not be so ‘short-sighted’ as to permit 600 libraries to shut in England. He urged the government to intervene to save these ‘vital assets’, adding that not to do so would make a ‘mockery of the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act’. The Act allows the secretary of state to intervene if local authorities are in breach of their statutory requirement to provide a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service in local communities.

From ‘Prothalamion’ There in a meadow by the river's side A flock of nymphs I chancéd to espy, All lovely daughters of the flood thereby, With goodly greenish locks all loose untied As each had been a bride; And each one had a little wicker basket Made of fine twigs, entrailéd curiously. In which they gather'd flowers to fill their flasket, And with fine fingers cropt full feateously The tender stalks on high. Of every sort which in that meadow grew They gather'd some; the violet, pallid blue, The little daisy that at evening closes, The virgin lily and the primrose true, With store of vermeil roses, To deck their bridegrooms' posies Against the bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

Jeffrey Archer is a menace. His books should be pulped and an Act of Parliament passed to ban their sale. They are the Maltesers of publishing. Once you’ve started one you can’t finish until you’ve scoffed the whole lot. And that can be very troubling. I missed stations, was late for meetings and kept the wife awake reading his last book, Only Time will Tell. The new sequel, The Sins of the Father, is no exception. It will keep your blood pressure high and you’ll risk back injury just from being kept on the edge of your seat. You may recall that, when I reviewed Only Time Will Tell, I revealed it finished on a spectacular twist of plot.

Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls are made at Auschwitz, Little Rock and downtown Chicago along the way, as chance meetings connect a barely literate black street sweeper in Manhattan with the last of Sonderkommando (the handful Jews who were coerced into assisting the Nazis deliver the Final Solution, and clean up afterwards). They are both victims, Perlman says in the dedication, of ‘the same disease’.