Nick Laird, Author . Harper Perennial $13.95 (344p) ISBN 978-0-06-082836-3
Laird—poet, former lawyer and husband of Zadie Smith—debuts, lad-lit style, with this sometimes entertaining story of childhood friends whose paths diverged radically and then reconverged. Danny Williams is a well-paid (if deeply...
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Nick Laird, Author . Norton $23.95 (73p) ISBN 978-0-393-06186-4
Uncommonly various, quirky and always intelligent, this poetic debut from Laird (raised in Northern Ireland, now a lawyer in London) comes on the heels of his debut novel, Utterly Monkey
(Reviews, Nov. 14).
Both attracted deserved plaudits in...
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Nick Laird, Author . Norton $23.95 (65p) ISBN 978-0-393-06776-7
Compact, careful, thoughtful and even wary, the second book of verse from Laird (who grew up in Northern Ireland and lives in London) gives the U.S. a fine representative of what younger mainstream British poets are doing right now. Like his peers,...
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Nick Laird, Author . Viking $25.95 (247p) ISBN 978-0-670-02097-3
It's hard to like a self-appointed cultural critic, but teacher-by-day, blogger-by-night David Pinner makes it schadenfreude-fun when he turns his loathing scope on his closest friends and then himself in Laird's latest (after Utterly...
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Nick Laird. Norton, $15.95 paper (70p) ISBN 978-0-393-34744-9
Though Laird (On Purpose) now lives in New York, his third poetry collection looks back insistently to his youth in Northern Ireland, and to the modes and the literature of Ireland and the U.K. Laird’s background can get him compared to Paul Muldoon,
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Nick Laird. Viking, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-02514-5
Pulling from the real-life events of 1993, when a young supporter of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a British loyalist paramilitary organization, shot up a small pub in Northern Ireland, Laird has written a truly superb novel exploring the...
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Nick Laird. Norton, $15.95 (96p) ISBN 978-1-324-00274-1
In Laird’s precise, energetic fourth collection (after Go Giants), his chief poetic gift—an intimate voice of mixed vernaculars that gets inside the reader’s head—is on full display. Whether bedside with his children, walking “a scrubby acre at...
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Nick Laird. Norton, $26.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-324-06544-9
The reflective fifth collection from Laird (Feel Free) continues the poet’s career-long exploration of voice and sensibility. Grief is the book’s central emotion and primary raison d’être: “I know nothing of your grief, granted,/ and you know...
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Zadie Smith and Nick Laird, illus. by Magenta Fox. Viking, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-59-352597-5
A pet seeks belonging in this familiar-feeling narrative, a picture book debut from married collaborators Smith and Laird as well as illustrator Fox. On Kit’s birthday, “her present was a soft, small, sleepy surprise”—a guinea pig dressed in a judo...
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