Nathan Newman
Nathan's Reviews
Here you'll find a collection of Nathan's best reviews – of other authors' websites:
Jennifer Egan
Interactive homepage that opens up into a smart, poppy listing of books and news. Go deeper and you'll find the legendary powerpoint from Goon Squad nestled in there with actual music attached.
An excellent, Egan-esque website.
SCORE: 10/10.
Martin Amis
RIP to the master, and owner of the most hilariously bad website this side of meatspin. The homepage is the worst possible shade of brown. Impossible to navigate, stuck in the 90s – but still weirdly nostalgic and comforting. So bad it's good etc.
The Sharknado of author websites.
SCORE: 2/10
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Undoubtedly the coolest url on the list. Just: Chimamanda.com. Once you get past the wall of Adichie's impressive citations – it's a strong website. Easy to navigate. Very pleasing on the eye.
(If you were wondering, Nathan.com is taken by a San-Francisco based motivational speaker specialising in sustainable business practices and generative communication.)
SCORE: 7/10
Geoff Dyer
A wordpress website! No frills, no homepages, just books books books. There's a photo of Dyer as a child wearing a cowboy hat, alongside a note that says "These photos of Geoff can be downloaded and used for promotional purposes."
SCORE: 8/10
Katie Kitamura
As elegant as her prose, this simple website gets the job done. There are 2,257 words of praise below the entry for Intimacies, a novel.
Trust me, I'd do the same if I could.
SCORE: 7.5/10
Hisham Matar
Homepage has no praise, no citations, just a photo from A Month in Sienna, and the words: "The encounter, twenty-five years later, between the writer and the city he had worshipped from afar.
Out now with Penguin Random House."
Mic-drop moment.
SCORE: 9/10
George Saunders
Deceptively simple, very economical – 4 menu tabs and all the books on one page. No fat. The "about" page is a lean 271 words.
The master does it again.
SCORE: 8/10
Susan Sontag
Posthumous. A website apparently designed to support the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, and not much else. Last updated in 2015. It doesn't have a digital security certificate – enter at your own risk!
SCORE: 4/10
Zadie Smith
English novelists have less fussy websites than their American counterparts, and this is an appropriately clean, straightforward one. Docking a few points only because there are a couple of dead links – although, now I think about it, maybe we need dead links. Everything is too functional nowadays...
SCORE: 6.5/10
Ocean Vuong
You could be mistaken for thinking Ocean Vuong was a gardener, or perhaps some sort of artistically-minded tree-surgeon, for his homepage is taken up entirely by a photo of a tree. I want to scoff, but goddamn it, it's a nice change – and yes, it's a nice tree, too.
SCORE: 7/10