Life Class
by Diana Athill (Granta)
Growing Old Disgracefully BBC documentary

Diana Athill published Stet in 2000, her amusing and revealing account of her life as an literary editor, when she was 82. One could have been forgiven for considering it an astute piece of literary housekeeping, the final gasp of a pen that was about to be laid down for good. It was her fourth installment of memoirs.

Things I Did While I Was Dead
By Rosie Garland (Flapjack Press)

Once there was a vampire lesbian poetess called Rosie Lugosi, who prowled the cellars and subterranean dives of the poetry scene under the discreet but wonderfully protective cover of darkness. Corseted to the point of sublime expiry, she bared her fangs, cracked her whip and, like a fallen angel from one of the better girls' schools of England, lambasted her audiences into quivering submission with her iconoclastic verses. Straight men felt uneasy, and uncomfortably aroused; their women smiled, some in titillation, others to mask their growing sense of having been offended; the gay men approved of the camp spectacle, whilst the Sapphic sisters in the crowd felt all of the above emotions, and more.

Chronic City
By Jonathan Lethem (Random House Audio, read by Mark Deakins)

That's right, audio book. Which seems appropriate. Because when listening to Mr. Deakins soar, sink, and hiccough his way through his recitation of the labyrinthine, pulpy narrative that Lethem teases out of the raw materials of millennial Manhattan, my mind’s eye thought more than once, “Would that Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater of the Air had their shot at this one!” The clotted, spooky story, full of diabolical artistes, creepy mayoral aides-de-camp, monstrous giants, and cancerous space girls, all orbiting around a consumptive genius, was begging for the same crew that put together “The Shadow Knows…,” The War of the Worlds, and Citizen Kane.

Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography
by Will Birch (Sidgwick & Jackson)

Ian Dury was a tremendously English composite whose success against the odds of unlikelihood and disability remains a lasting example of what a determined soul can manage to attain. Ten years after his death, at the age of fifty seven, he has been the subject of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, a frantically chaotic bio-pic that gives a good thumbnail portrait of a life of immense complexity and contradiction, but misses out on many of the finer points which go a long way to explaining Dury's disparate nature.

Cold Snap
by Francis King (Arcadia)

Love stirs in circumstances unlikely to allow its survival. The more the odds stack up against a happy conclusion, the greater the effort the star-crossed undertake to prove the validity of their feelings. Cold Snap is a novel set in a particular winter, 1947, in the refined and snowy setting of Oxford, but one under which the long shadow of the Second World War stretches across that idyllic whiteness.

Take It to Heart
by Kathleen Farrell (Rupert Hart Davis)

If Kathleen Farrell's first novel, Mistletoe Malice, was a dissection of the dreaded and dreadful family Christmas, her second, Take It To Heart (1953), was a none-too-flattering stab at the motivations and mechanics of love. Hers was not Valentines and flowers, nor the happy-ever-after appropriation of feelings. It is a world driven by need, insecurity, and the wish for control. Love is a condition, but is rarely conditional. A myriad of impulses, far removed from sententious versions of the real, in which she drafts a series of relationships, none of which could be described as fair, balanced, or emotionally genuine, but which drive their perpetrators to distraction and despair.

For an author who published little, J. D. Salinger had immense influence on successive generations. His literary creation Holden Caulfield became the American Everyboy, a Huckleberry Finn for baby boomers and beyond. Salinger succeeded in encapsulating adolescent distance from the adult world. It was a literary feat he seemed incapable or reluctant to repeat. Secretive to the point of paranoia, he became a brooding, beguiling enigma, a one-book wonder, the Garbo of the printed word.

He made it to 91. Now begins the drum beat -- recluse, Catcher in the Rye author, are there hidden manuscripts? Let the poor guy rest in peace. Forget Catcher, get out Nine Stories; if you can't read the entire thing cover to cover, immediately read "For Esme...," "Uncle Wiggley," "Teddy," (forget "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"!), and my personal favorite, "The Laughing Man." Then go through everything from Franny and Zoe, and give yourself a treat with the magisterial Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. Then, we'll talk. J. D., wherever you are, thank you. - Ken Krimstein

Mr. Krimstein is a writer, cartoonist, father, and grump who lives in New York City. So there.

The Cost of Living
by Kathleen Farrell (Macmillan)

Having successfully laid bare the machinations of what love is to many in her previous novel, Take It To Heart, one could have expected Farrell to have continued with the same astute intensity. Instead, in 1956 she delivered the breezy The Cost of Living, a colorful, deceptively simple affair, its lightness of touch belying a certainty of purpose in presenting an apparently scatty arrangement of existence and the echoes of a singular evening. Seldom can appearances have been so delightfully deceptive, and although the flippant undertone never quite deserts these pages, the tone darkens gradually and imperceptibly, in the way an afternoon slips into night.

Come What May
by Donal Og Cusack (Penguin Ireland)

The death of Stephen Gately rang out the bells of irony, but their chimes were absent from the mournful proceedings in Dublin. What occurred amounted to a state funeral, in a Catholic country. The deceased, an openly gay, married pop star, was given respect, the kind of respect he would still have been denied had he not been famous. Ireland pretends to be a modernist state, but the Catholic Church still casts a disquieting shadow over the lives of those of whom it disapproves.

Undiscovered Gyrl
by Allison Burnett (Vintage)

The gimmick of e-mail novels was spawned about five minutes after the birth of e-mail itself. Blog novels? Every other new novelist these days is a blogger, or birthed their idea on a blog. Which is why Allison Burnett's new book, Undiscovered Gyrl, is actually so welcome. It doesn't use blogging as a gimmick, it uses it as a setting. Like London to Dickens, or the Mississippi River to Twain, that vague "place" we all inhabit known as cyberspace is where this book lives.

Rock and roll poets are few and far between, and the modifier suggests something less than the genuine article, someone who would never be courted by the literary world, a maverick imposter in the hallowed house of words. Jim Carroll was that rare, exotic creature, a rock interloper whose talent could not be airily dismissed. A lauded contradiction who was equally at home in a rock band and a literary salon. He had also been a budding basketball player, the handsome embodiment of the American dream, but Carroll's early sporting promise took a turn towards darkness. He would never really emerge from these shadows, but that made him the Rimbaud of Manhattan and beyond.

Mozipedia: The Encyclopaedia of Morrissey & The Smiths
by Simon Goddard (Ebury Press)

Andy Warhol surrounded himself with a variety of freaks, drag queens, and speed heads. The miscreants of Manhattan. He used them in his films, took Polaroids of them, and provided their short and tragic lives with a longevity they wouldn't otherwise have attained. There is a trace of Warhol in Morrissey's supporting cast of stragglers. The difference between him and the silver-wigged wonder is that his are obscure, misunderstood, and largely unknown to the person who admires them so.

Harold Norse 1916-2009

Some writers put their effort into living, while others strive to leave much work behind. Beat poet Harold Norse knew the literary giants of several generations and lived long and well, leaving only a few fine books as evidence. He has cameo roles in the lives of, amongst many, W.H Auden, William Carlos Williams, Paul Bowles, James Baldwin, and Tennessee Williams. His handsome presence will continue to slip between the pages of their lives as long as they are written about.

Although Frank McCourt will be remembered as a writer, that career, begun in retirement, eclipsed his lifetime's labours as a teacher in New York. His memoir of a flea- and rat-infested childhood in 1930s Limerick, Angela's Ashes, seemed to annotate an earlier, Dickensian kind of poverty, and was largely responsible foe the industry known as "the misery memoir." His was the first, but few that followed in his wake were as refined, and as eloquent, as his particular distillation.

In a debut, unflinching and unrelenting, the classic combination is harnessed. A down-trodden Irish mother, a drunken patriotic father, dead infant siblings, and the uncaring influence of the Catholic church.

Jacques Bisceglia/Steve Dalachinsky
Reaching into the Unknown 1964-2009 (RogueArt)

French jazz label RogueArt, which has issued twenty CDs, has branched out into jazz books. The first was Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue, an interesting little volume wherein poet/critic Steve Dalachinsky interviewed avant-jazz pianist Matthew Shipp about the philosophical/spiritual underpinnings of his creativity (with photos by Lorna Lentini). Dalachinsky’s second project with RogueArt is way bigger, a 429-page collaboration mixing poetry and photography.

After a Funeral
by Diana Athill (Ticknor & Fields)

Beer in the Snooker Club
by Waguih Ghali (New Amsterdam Books)

Diana Athill turned 91 on December 21, became an OBE in the Queen's New Year Honours List, and were that not compliment enough has now been announced as the deserving recipient of the Costa Award for Biography for her astute account of the progress of age Somewhere Towards the End.

Sempe Highs and Lows
by Jean Jacques Sempe (Phaidon)

Sweetness is poison. There is probably not a more horrible epithet to throw at any modern artist -- in any field. The word conjures up fields of Hallmark sentiments draped in saccharine emotion and as light as a souffle rapidly collapsing. In short, sweetness sucks. Big time.

The passing of Sir Reresby Sitwell brings to a close one of the most eccentric and diverting chapters of English lives and letters. His father Sacheverell, his Uncle Osbert and Aunt Edith were considered outlandlish heretics in the 1920's, that generation's equivalent of literary punks. Their patronage of the young composer William Walton resulted in 'Facade' which consisted of Edith reciting her uniquely eclectic verses through a megaphone as Walton's music skipped and shimmered, the first performance of which ended in an actual riot of disapproval.

We Hate It When Our Ex-Lodgers Become Successful
by Marvin Cheeseman (Cheers Ta Publications)

A sense of fun is all too often absent from poetry. It doesn't have to be difficult or elitist, but humor is mostly seen as a disadvantage to the high-minded, a case of letting the side down. Marvin Cheeseman is a poet who thankfully has been letting sides down with laughter and tremendous aplomb for years. His work has been featured on the BBC, TV and radio. He's even been name-checked by the Ting Tings. A perfect collision of a pop sensibility with a wry twist on the everyday.

House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon)

If you don’t enjoy dark and disturbing sojourns into the foreboding unknown, then, in its own words, this story is not for you. If, on the other hand, you are willing to be infected and possessed by a book that will reach out and crawl under your skin as it draws you into the emptiness opening before you, then grab your measuring tape and head to the nearest bookstore.

Mistletoe Malice
by Kathleen Farrell (Rupert Hart Davis)

It was a brave move by Kathleen Farrell (1912-1999) to position her first novel (published in 1951) over those few portentous days known as the Festive season. Such a particular setting doesn't bode well for a long life on the shelves, the literary equivalent of a good melody marooned on a Christmas record. Her book employs the classic country house setting of an Agatha Christie, where a group of perfectly disagreeable people assemble under one roof. In Farrell's case, all could murder each other, but don't, they merely scratch, bicker, and add to the overall misery of their daily lives, supposedly in the name of celebrating Christ's birthday.