The TMO Litblog
The TMO litblog is a collection of short posts, reviews, and tweets dedicated to literary fiction and book news.
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
Samuel Beckett’s Postmodern Fictions – an essay by Brian Finneyhttp://bit.ly/10eWnh # Sean O’Casey – Portrait of the Artist as an Outsiderhttp://bit.ly/5BKLG # Dublin author Trevor Byrne interviewed about his debut novel Ghosts and Lightninghttp://bit.ly/sVF2r # Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of choicehttp://bit.ly/RTmPU # From the TMO archives – Nadeem Aslam, writing against terrorhttp://bit.ly/kmHiA # Laila Lalami on […]
Tags: literary tweets
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Sunday, June 7th, 2009
Kate Atkinson would, money permitting, prefer to write and not be published http://bit.ly/18nBaC # Stuart Evers is allergic to AS Byatt http://bit.ly/B8CeI # Revisioning ‘The Great Gatsby’, an essay by Susan Bell (via the elegant variation) http://bit.ly/CxZiX # From the Hay festival audio archive -John Mullan & how the novel works http://bit.ly/rTy0y # Eduardo Galeano […]
Tags: literary tweets
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Sunday, May 31st, 2009
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 […]
Tags: literary tweets
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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 # […]
Tags: literary tweets
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
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, […]
Tags: chuck palahniuk
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is […]
Tags: 9/11 and literature, european novels, narrative voices
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
A medieval Irish monastery under siege by the forces of darkness, who find their breach in the cell of the unfortunate brother Fursey, a monk blessed with a stammer who thus can’t adequately perform the rites of exorcism required to keep the monastery safe. The premise alone, regardless of the excellent execution, should be enough […]
Tags: irish authors, james joyce
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Saturday, April 18th, 2009
This blog has often focussed on great openings to novels, interested particularly in that magical moment where you, the reader, accept an opening contract from the author. What makes us choose one book over another is an area where the ending doesn’t come into play. A handy approach that also spares us the risk of […]
Tags: irish authors
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty – despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended. It has though, thus far (I’m […]
Tags: european novels
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
How do you choose what writers to read? Or more specifically, how do you choose from those writers that you know you’re ‘supposed’ to read? The dead and dusty ones from the canon. I take shortcuts, which is probably the reason why Cervantes has never darkened my door. Short stories have many virtues, but they’re […]
Tags: short stories
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