…the interview with John Banville is now available here.

This week my blog has been about as fresh as RTE’s summer schedule. In my defense, an interview that John Banville graciously agreed to do should be appearing ASAP on the main Three Monkeys Online site. In the meantime, I offer up links to these two interesting, meaty articles, both of which make rather startling […]

It seems that my vice of watching Living TV to catch CSI (not so much CSI: Miami or CSI:NY–these franchisees lack the ineffable appeal of the original Las Vegas series) is at least shared by J.G. Ballard (in his article in the Guardian Review)In his attempt to explain, “given that there are no interesting characters, […]

Then the The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection might be for you!However if you take advantage of this Amazon deal (You save $5,327.75!), you might want to put up a few extra shelves first:”…the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages–laid end to end they would hit the […]

A Guardian story discusses the possibility that the tax-free status for artists might be dropped because it is being ‘taken advantage of’ by millionaire writers and pop-stars. Among the high-profile artists availing of the tax exemption by living (at least part of the year) in Ireland are DBC Pierre, Michel Houellebecq, Alan Warner, Elvis Costello […]

Occasionally I use this blog as a platform to plug the efforts of the rest of my family to convert the rest of the world to the joys of StikAx system. I won’t recap what this neat little gadget actually does, because a London-based animator has produced a very slick movie that will do a […]

From a profile of Haruki Murakami*:”He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. – he never dreams, he said – he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to […]

From the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award site:”The winner was announced by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Michael Conaghan in City Hall, Dublin on Wednesday 15th June.In their comments on the novel the judges said “The Known World begins with the death, at the age of 31, of Henry Townsend, a black farmer in […]

Bloodaxe Books were kind enough to send me a copy of J.H. Prynne’s massive Poems, which weighs in at 590 pages and covers work spanning from 1968 up to 2004.A fellow of Gonville & Caius (that’s pronounced Keys riff-raff) College, Prynne is a somewhat controversial figure, I gather, in that vanishingly small circle of people […]