White Teeth by Zadie Smith
I'm getting caught up on the books everyone is recommending and I'm finding this one immensely entertaining. Zadie Smith creates an incredibly vivid group of lovable yet unlikable characters. She's a real, fresh new talent, a youthful voice that at the same time isn't self-consciously youthful. Most young writers usually seem to be saying, "I'm hip and young writing about young people," but Smith can write about all kinds of people, as well, and her novel has a classic feel to it.

-- Janelle Brown

The Last Days of Disco by Whit Stillman
Anyone who has seen Whit Stillman's witty, idiosyncratic films ("Metropolitan") about the young, WASP-y and self-conscious in Manhattan might suspect that most of his characters have monologues running incessantly in their heads, even when the filmmaker doesn't allow us to eavesdrop on them via voice-over. "The Last Days of Disco," a novel based on Stillman's movie of the same title, confirms it. The novel begins with narrator Jimmy Steinway ("The Dancing Adman") explaining that "all of us, except Charlotte, loved the movie -- not entirely surprising, since so did all good film critics the world over (i.e., not David Denby) ... Des later said that the Denby piece read as if some sort of sexual jealousy were involved." Stillman's conceit is that Steinway -- who, like his friends, is 27, struggling to get by at his first job and dancing the nights away in early '80s Manhattan -- has been hired to write a novelization of the film. The result is an airy blend of Thurber and Nancy Mitford, sophisticated without making a fuss about it, and lots of fun.

-- Laura Miller

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