Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

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 [...]

Fragments shored against my ruin: @harmlessfraud takes a look at Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture
http://bit.ly/SnaIg #
Censoring an Iranian Love Story
http://bit.ly/2MbWzZ #
Ha Jin talks about the mother of all mother-in-law stories http://bit.ly/ZD1k3 RT @GrantaMag #
Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce
http://bit.ly/pbaRb #
Fifty-Two Stories is the @canongatebooks [...]

- Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. #
- O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words. #
9:15AM; “Kingstown pier,” Stephen said. “Yes, a disappointed bridge.” RT @UlyssesSeen #
A good introduction to Joyce’s Ulysses, from the TMO archives, for Bloomsday
http://bit.ly/G6MW5 #
Bloomin’ Marvellous - James Joyce and [...]

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 [...]

Firstly apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks (apart from our twitter updates). The whole TMO crew have been taken up with sprucing up the site (a work in progress - stay tuned) and doing interviews.
We’ve some exciting news though for facebook users - the book blog will be giving [...]

Samuel Beckett’s Postmodern Fictions - an essay by Brian Finneyhttp://bit.ly/10eWnh #
Sean O’Casey - Portrait of the Artist as an Outsiderhttp://bit.ly/5BKLG #
Dublin author Trevor Byrne interviewed about his debut novel Ghosts and Lightninghttp://bit.ly/sVF2r #
Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of choicehttp://bit.ly/RTmPU #
From the TMO archives - Nadeem Aslam, writing against terrorhttp://bit.ly/kmHiA #
Laila Lalami on the writer as self-critichttp://bit.ly/pgWP7 #
Five [...]

Kate Atkinson would, money permitting, prefer to write and not be published
http://bit.ly/18nBaC #
Stuart Evers is allergic to AS Byatt
http://bit.ly/B8CeI #
Revisioning ‘The Great Gatsby’, an essay by Susan Bell (via the elegant variation)
http://bit.ly/CxZiX #
From the Hay festival audio archive -John Mullan & how the novel works
http://bit.ly/rTy0y #
Eduardo Galeano interview on the Open Veins of Latin [...]

Blogtrotter review of Michel Faber’s ‘The Fire Gospel’
http://bit.ly/U1dw4 #
Litblogs on Kindle? A lot of fuss about nothing, according to the Literary Saloon
http://bit.ly/t0vFq #
In case you were searching for an online comic-book adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses
http://bit.ly/47JbSl #
And from the same people, as we run up to bloomsday it’s worth following @UlyssesSeen #
Picador make Jon Ronson’s Men [...]

The Times takes a look at Faber’s history, as the publisher celebrates its 80th birthdayhttp://bit.ly/TrXZa #
The telegraph turns great literature into tweetshttp://bit.ly/13tw5a #
Ruth Padel is the first female Oxford professor of poetryhttp://bit.ly/BDtZl #
Trailer for Art Spiegelman new book ‘Be a nose’a rare glimpse at the secret scribblings of an American original.http://bit.ly/6WgLC #
People’s Choice Award goes [...]

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 [...]

How do you choose what writers to read? Or more specifically, how do you choose from those writers that you know you’re ’supposed’ to read? The dead and dusty ones from the canon. 
I take shortcuts, which is probably the reason why Cervantes has never darkened my door. Short stories have many virtues, but they’re unparalleled [...]

Novelists Paul Auster and David Grossman appeared together last night on Italian television in a show of solidarity with author Roberto Saviano, who for the last three years has lived under police protection after receiving death threats from the Italian criminal organisation the camorra. They join a growing list, including Salman Rushdie, who have appeared [...]

“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the [...]

Sometimes I wish that, when buying a book in a book store, you were automatically given a complimentary title - that is to say, a book that will help you read the one you’ve just bought, as opposed to the ‘like this? you’ll love that’ recommendation.
For example, with Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, you’d [...]