It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas‘s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped – almost Bloom like – by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte […]
TMO looks at Reif Larsen’s ‘The selected works of T.S.Spivet – a novel’ http://bit.ly/aNAEDs # Terry Eagleton on Hitchens, Amis & McEwan, the liberal literati http://bit.ly/bAWqTy (via @readysteadybook) # Powered by Twitter Tools.
Irish writers are more insiders than outsiders now. We have the Arts Council to give us bursaries, albeit much reduced since the Depression began; we have Aosdána to support us in our old age; we have Ireland Literature Exchange to help our work into translation, there are grants for travel, there’s Writers in the Schools, […]
Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is […]
The ten finalists for the 3% translated book award – http://bit.ly/aTjcvt # The Elegant Variation’s summer of debuts – http://bit.ly/9xhg76 # New post up at the TMO book blog – ‘The House of the Mosque’ by Kader Abdolah http://bit.ly/cjwXbi # Tim Parks on the ‘dull new global novel’ http://bit.ly/8X92EC # King Lear, madness and my […]
‘Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov’ – Geoff Dyer http://bit.ly/d51hP4 # Powered by Twitter Tools.
I finished Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque on the same day that organised celebrations (and crackdowns on civil unrest) took place in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution which swept Mohammad-Rez? Sh?h Pahlavi from power and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Looking at the pictures […]
TMO review of Anne Enright’s ‘The wig my father wore’ – http://bit.ly/bbFXiL # rt @maudnewton Recordings of F. Scott Fitzgerald reading Shakespeare: http://bit.ly/cdBBpF (via @Condalmo) # Book Fox on the predictive power of book reviews http://bit.ly/bYJaAi # Lizzy Siddal is accepting questions for a Kader Abdolah interview, author of ‘House of the Mosque’ http://bit.ly/aLPoJZ # […]
Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening – it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive […]