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 [...]
One of the ideas behind setting up ‘Is there a book in this blog?’ was to create a space where contributors could jump right in and make off-the-cuff observations about books/writers without the need to build up a structured review piece (there are plenty of those elsewhere in Three Monkeys Online).
With that spirit in mind, [...]
4th Estate celebrate their 25th birthday this year, and to mark it have produced a very nice film which reminds you of many of the great books they’ve published
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
Some favourites here include Michael Chabon’s novels, Robert Fisk’s huge book on the middle east, and most recently [...]
Regular readers of Three Monkeys will know that we have a soft-spot for the Italian literary collective Wu Ming, the people behind novels like Q and 54 (which is very much on our ‘to-review’ list). Wu Ming I (there are five of them) has just published a thoughtful piece where he attempts to define what [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
Back in December, mediabistro’s GalleyCat posed the question ‘Where will we find Literature’s Radiohead?‘. Not a question of matching literary style up to the Oxford band’s musical approach (although over at the Valve they see a similarity between Yeats and the band), but rather the starting point for a discussion on distribution methods - [...]
It’s the elephant in the corner really, isn’t it? Last week’s announcement of the Booker prize longlist has been one of the main talking points for literary minded souls, and not just in the Commonwealth and Ireland. Delays in the launch of this blog meant that it was hardly worthwhile posting on the longlist - [...]
A short selection of our favourite lit blogs
For the full list go to our literary blog links page.
