This is fun to read—and a rare pleasure, too, since the importance of perfume advertising means that one doesn’t often get to read strong criticism of multimillion-dollar-earning fragrances. The joy of Turin and Sanchez’s book, however, is their ability to write about smell in a way that manages to combine the science of the subject with the vocabulary of scent in witty, vivid descriptions of what these smells are like. Their work is, quite simply, ravishingly entertaining, and it passes the high test that their praise is even more compelling than their criticism.

— John Lanchester reviews the upcoming book by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide. Read more in Scents and Sensibility in The New Yorker.

Luca Turin fans will be happy to hear that his next book, Perfumes: The Guide, is due out from Viking in April 2008. The book will be co-authored with Tania Sanchez, and promises to…

…include reviews of more than 1,200 fragrances, from “Undoubted Masterpieces” to the “Monumentally Awful.” (via publishersweekly)

The Guide will feature all-new material (it is not an English translation of Turin's out-of-print Parfums: le Guide) and will be sized to allow readers to carry it along with them while shopping for perfume…

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