Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Over at the Guardian book blog there’s a debate blowing after a post  dealing with Jim Crace’s plans to retire. The post has provoked all sorts of reactions regarding the merits of a writer’s age/youth, many largely missing the point made by Crace.
Perhaps the most worrying thing, though, regarding the post is the implication that [...]

Some posts ago we took up the ‘who’ll be literature’s radiohead’ argument up, suggesting that there are already a number of established authors who have been giving away their work a la In Rainbows - for example the Wu Ming foundation or Mega-bestseller Neil Gaiman.
Word comes through (via Lizzy’s Literary Life) of a new publishing [...]

Back in the ‘90s, I read Tobias Wolff’s memoirs of growing up in a struggling, single-parent family - This Boy’s Life (1989) - and of serving as a junior officer in the U.S. airborne division in Vietnam - In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). I was impressed by both books, for the honesty [...]

“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The [...]

Sarah Loud,head of digital publishing at Pan Macmillan, has published a much talked about Publisher’s manifesto for the 21st Century over at The Digatilist.
It’s a long piece, and well worth reading. It starts with a fairly common position, that in this social-media/internet/mobile entertainment world the days of the book are numbered.  
“More and more books [...]

Sad news was reported on Friday, that American writer David Foster Wallace has apparently comitted suicide, at the age of 46.
TMO’s very own Shane Barry wrote two perceptive pieces on DFW back in January 2006 (link), approaching the American writer’s work with caution through his collection of stories Oblivion. 
We reprint the second piece here:
Two stories [...]

Orhan Pamuk is interviewed in the latest edition of Venerdi di Repubblica magazine, here in Italy, and discusses the lengthy writing process he undertook for his new novel The Museum of Innocence, which will be published later this year (the Turkish version coming first, will be unveiled at this year’s Frankfurt book fair, where Turkey [...]

This is something I’ve been going on about in Our Man in Gdansk for some time now. This time, the book in question, though Polish, is available in an English translation by the highly regarded translator Bill Johnston. I refer to Andrzej Stasiuk’s 9. Look at the mess on page 6:
To the right there’d once [...]

Just for the record, this year’s Man Booker Shortlist has been announced:

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs - Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

Perhaps the most notable absences from the longlist are John [...]

I’ve yet to read any novels by George Sanders, but after  reading the following passage in an interview between Ben Marcus and Saunders, taken from meaty Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, I think it’s about time I did:
So, when I’m writing, I am trying to move myself, or impress myself, or prevent myself [...]

“This book makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.” This is the encouraging opening of a review of Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography, by Rand Brandes and Michael A. Durkan which appeared in the ever-gripping Irish Times [...]

I feel more than a little sullied, having finished George and Martha by Karen Finley, and I’ve a feeling that this is one of the desired effects by the author as she pits George W. Bush and Martha Stewart as fictional acerbic lovers holed up in a motel attempting to pleasure themselves in oedipal hi-jinks.
It’s [...]