The TMO litblog is a collection of short posts, reviews, and tweets dedicated to literary fiction and book news.
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 […]
“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the […]
As February draws to a close, and this blog’s ‘to read’ pile of books is increasingly resembling babel, it’s worth taking some consolation – knowing that a too-high percentage of these books will remain, forever, merely glanced at – offered up by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his rightfully acclaimed The Black Swan: The writer Umberto […]
Though suffering a major nervous breakdown, Mark Haddon’s 57 year old protagonist George, in the novel A spot of bother has plenty of pragmatic insights. For example, casually while trying to fight off panic he finishes reading a novel (Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell), but chooses to turn on the t.v rather than start a […]
A number of things have, until now, put me off reading the novels of Martin Amis. There was the infamous and justified criticism that his father Kingsley voiced, declaring that his novels had “that constant demonstrating of his command of English”. There was that poor introduction to his work that was Time’s Arrow – perhaps […]
Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer, a Palestinian activist who has legally contested land seizures. He is also one of the founders of Al Haq, a non-governmental organisation that works to protect human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, he is a walker and a writer. These two […]
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, […]
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