The adventures of a corporate anthropologist. Samuel Beckett knew this—though his Vladimir and Estragon did not. They waited for Godot anyway, the butt of a tragic, cosmic joke. Andy Warhol knew this, ...

Tom McCarthy, a London-based writer, avoids the lyrical sentimentalism that’s saturated the English literary market. His influences owe more to high modernists like Beckett, Joyce and Burroughs than ...

“I got really into creases. Jeans crease in all kinds of interesting ways: honeycomb, whisker, train-track, stack…I catalogued no fewer than seventeen different crease-types, each of which has ...

I came away from this novel knowing, like the fakir of old, that I was merely touching the flank of the elephant. So, my review, if such it is, like all reviews is limited and very subjective. I’m ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, began discerning patterns in texts no one had ...

Why would Booker nominated British novelist Tom McCarthy ever give the people what they want? You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account. We ...

In his first novel since “C,” nominated for the Booker Prize in 2010, Tom McCarthy continues his exploration of the search for meaning in the modern age while subverting what a novel can be with the ...

At one point in Tom McCarthy’s new novel, “Satin Island,” the narrator, a man called U. reads a disturbing story in the newspaper: A parachutist has plummeted to his death in England, and the police ...

Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (Vintage Contemporaries) features a protagonist who, as his company's corporate anthropologist, has been given the enormous task of compiling a report summing up the modern ...

How many novels can truly be called epoch-defining? Ulysses, obviously. Don Quixote, War and Peace and maybe The Sorrows of Young Werther. Beyond Europe’s insular frontiers, The Tale of Genji defined ...

Now, "Satin Island." It's the title of the new book by Tom McCarthy, the acclaimed experimental novelist. It is a novel, but our reviewer Alan Cheuse says it might be more apt to call it a critique of ...