Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
I haven’t read more than three chapters of Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi, but I’m moved to blog about it straight away for a couple of good reasons. First off, I just love the title, and the premise of the book. The novel starts with a fifteen year old boy rooting around in his family’s […]
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
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 […]
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
Derek Raymond, the English noir writer whom Interpol knew better as Robin Cook, could spell in at least two languages, as his dystopian novel A State of Denmark proves. Leave aside comparisons to Orwell, with the novel’s imagined totalitarian England run by a media-backed dictator called Jobling, and instead concentrate on the words frazione, presa, […]
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
While Carlo Lucarelli’s detective novel Carte Blanche includes plenty of standard genre devices, it’s unlikely to turn up in the excellent ‘do it yourself giallo generator‘ (via Detectives without borders). For one thing its title is too short, and doesn’t contain an animal (not that the inclusion of an animal in the title necessarily makes […]