World leaders like Angela Merkel, Lula De Silva, and Ban Ki Moon appear on the front page of the ‘International Herald Tribune’ announcing a historic climate-saving deal. Full details here There was only one catch: the paper was fake. Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the […]
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 […]
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 # […]
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, […]
Silvio Berlusconi has always vaunted two major talents – an ability to control the media (both his own – a substantial slice of tv and print – as well as those supposedly independent), and a masterful ability to keep together seemingly shakey partnerships. It’s against this backdrop that his second wife, Veronica Lario, dropped a […]
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, […]
There are chilling moments in the life of any straniero when they realise that, with all the reflection, study, and will that certain ways of thinking, produced by local culture, tradition, and a very different history, will always be beyond them. These are moments, more often than not, conjured up out of hot-air when politicos […]
Responding to some ill-defined public outrage (in part manafactured by newspapers owned or close to the Berlusconi family), both Prime Minister Berlusconi and the speaker of the house of deputies, Gianfranco Fini, called for swift and decisive action – not against builders responsible, in Abruzzo, for using shoddy materials and cutting costs, nor against civil […]
You know you’re getting spammed in the comments when you receive a gushing tribute, to a post you wrote about Walter Veltroni, saying that the topic is ‘quite trendy on the net at the moment’. You can say many things about Walter Veltroni – and many do – but to the best of this blog’s […]
Economists at LaVoce have issued a proposal for the Government to easily raise 172 million euro that can be set aside for reconstruction work. In belt-tightening times you’d imagine the government would be all ears, but I’ve the suspicion that this is a proposal that will be deftly ignored. In June the country is set […]
