Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2013
368 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
For over two decades, Andrew O'Hagan has been publishing critical essays in celebrated periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic - among them The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and other publications. The Atlantic Ocean highlights the best of his clear-eyed, brilliant work, beginning with an essay tracing the "special relationship" between Britain and America since the days of Margaret Thatcher and ending with an extraordinary piece about the lives, and deaths, of Guardsman Anthony Wakefield and US Marine Corporal Lieutenant Colonel John C. Spahr, who both died in Iraq on May 2, 2005. O'Hagan's subjects range from the rise of the tabloids to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the trajectory of the Beatles and the impossibility of not fancying Marilyn Monroe.
The Atlantic Ocean is a fascinating, important, and timely collection.
"Starred Review. A brilliant essayist, [O'Hagan] constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility" - Booklist
"A mixed bag with some very good lines (if often spoken by others) jumbled up with some rather stale ephemera." - Kirkus
"...at his most impressive, O'Hagan demonstrates that fiction can compel us to redefine reality, as when hurricane Katrina, tossing hotels and casinos through the air and wrapping chandeliers in Spanish moss, transforms the grotesque fantasies of Southern Gothic into 'a form of social realism'. Lies dribble from the slack mouths of politicians; if we want to know the truth about the false world we live in, we need to consult the writers of fiction." - The Guardian
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Photo: Jerry Bauer
Andrew O'Hagan is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Ganta magazine. His first novel, Our Fathers (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.
In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelist.
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