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 [...]
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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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
The Tailor and Ansty (sometimes known as The Tailor and Anstey) by Eric Cross was considered so fiendishly obscene or indecent in its general tendency that it was for many years banned in Ireland. When parts of it were quoted in a Seanad (senate) debate in the 1940s there were calls for the quoted bits [...]
A popular arts show in Italy, Che tempo che fa, has appealed to viewers to write in to the show requesting books that, currently out-of-print, they’d like to see re-published by authors.
Top of the list is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis.
Another surprising entry is Alan Hollinghurst’s recent Booker winning novel The Line of Beauty [...]
Is Chuck Palahniuk one of America’s most underrated or overrated novelists? The answer to the question probably revolves around your attitude towards the shocking, because he is without doubt a novelist with the power to churn the stomach (although the reported faintings at readings of his short story ‘Guts’ seems exaggerated to me).
Speaking to Three [...]
I very rarely have the cause or inclination to browse to the Financial Times, but was glad to have done so today. The immediate reasoning was to check for news on the troubled bank of which I am, unfortunately, an account holder. No particular joy there, but instead I stumbled upon an extract from Margaret [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Never judge a book by its cover. Sage advice, but what about its title? I approached Jonathan Lethem’s slim short-story collection Men and Cartoons less than enthusiastically, resigned to reading it because it was a) a gift, and b) short.
The problem? The title, plus the promise that more than one story would concern itself with superherose, or [...]
I can sympathise, to an extent, with DoveGreyReader who approached Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland with trepidation given the tag ‘post 9-11 masterpiece’ (the Observer) that has been widely used by enthusiastic reviewers.
It’s a problematic tag for any novel, but particularly so in this case given that the novel scarcely concerns itself with the attacks or their aftermath. That’s not [...]
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