Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped - almost Bloom like - by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte [...]

Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is [...]

I finished Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque on the same day that organised celebrations (and crackdowns on civil unrest) took place in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution which swept Mohammad-Rez? Sh?h Pahlavi from power and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Looking at the pictures [...]

Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) - a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening - it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive [...]

Chanced upon an interesting review of Anne Enright’s ‘The Gathering’ http://bit.ly/ZyJvW #
Hearing good things about David Vann’s ‘Legend of a suicide’ http://bit.ly/215OEP #
So it turns out that @wuming6 is not, in fact, Wu Ming - see: http://bit.ly/D7AED Cheeky! RT @VersoBooksUK #

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When I first saw the candy crusted bunny leering at me from a shelf in a bookshop, I thought ‘ah…another post- modern whatever self-absorbed ramble from a worthy author’s jadedness’. I have a particular weakness for being both attracted to and repelled by such narcissism which is why my eye wandered up to ‘The Death [...]

Should the laws of physics apply? Oyeyemi’s White is for Witchinghttp://bit.ly/14Uaxc #
Flightpaths - a networked novel
http://www.flightpaths.net/ #
Ruth Dudley Edwards takes Banville to task. Is he slumming it when writing as Benjamin Black?
http://bit.ly/IdN2H #
The Guardian ‘not the booker’ prize longlist is here - you can vote until the 23rd August
http://bit.ly/7P6p0 #
Coetzee reads from his new novel [...]

Should the laws of physics apply to a novel? There are readers who,  not without reason, demand that yes, the laws of gravity, and thermodynamics must apply at all times if the work is to be taken seriously.
For example, if a character is to cross a room, they should do so - with or without [...]

Did you know socialism was bad? You did? Good. Because it is, you know. Bad, that is – not good. Just thought you might need straightening out on that point, the one about socialism being bad. A lot of you westerners think it’s good, you see. But it’s not. It’s bad.

This kind of preaching [...]

‘Tragic’ was always one of those easy-to-reach for words used to describe Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’. It managed to avoid picking sides, and recognised that things were more complicated on the ground than the simple catholic vs protestant / irish vs british equations.  Not such a bad thing, but more often than not it was also [...]

It’s refreshing to hear an author declare in no uncertain terms that they don’t like the cover of their novel. M.J. Hyland did exactly that on a recent radio interview when asked about her latest novel This is How. Not, presumably because there’s anything wrong with the cover per se - it’s an elegant and [...]

There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice.
Three things stopped me, though - the peculiarly grumpy looking duck on [...]

It’s June, so breaking a New Year’s resolution I return again to blog briefly about a book that I’ve just started - Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone. I couldn’t resist because of this wonderful passage on Italy - tying in nicely with BB Scimmia’s post of some time ago on Imagining Italy
Madden’s narrator [...]

Frank O’Connor, one of the masters of the form, was repeatedly asked what differentiated a short story from a novel or novella, and over the course of his career he come up with some interesting answers. For example, interviewed by the Paris Review he suggested that one of the crucial dividing lines was not length, [...]

Novelist and  short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is [...]

So, yesterday I took some of our own TMO advice (doled out by our twitter feed @litblog) and joined publisher Canongate’s site www.meetatthegate.com..
I did it out of curiosity, but also for another simple reason - they’re giving away a free download of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift. Hyde’s book has a cult following already, [...]

A medieval Irish monastery under siege by the forces of darkness, who find their breach in the cell of the unfortunate brother Fursey, a monk blessed with a stammer who thus can’t adequately perform the rites of exorcism required to keep the monastery safe. 

The premise alone, regardless of the excellent execution, should be enough to [...]

This blog has often focussed on great openings to novels, interested particularly in that magical moment where you, the reader, accept an opening contract from the author. What makes us choose one book over another is an area where the ending doesn’t come into play. 
A handy  approach that also spares us the risk of ruining [...]

It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty - despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended.
It has though, thus far (I’m half [...]

David Ost’s The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (2005) is the best book of its kind I know. His central thesis is that anger is an inevitable by-product of capitalism and should be channelled into class struggle where it can do some good for ordinary workers. If not, grievances caused by [...]