There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice. Three things stopped me, though – the peculiarly grumpy looking duck […]
Fragments shored against my ruin: @harmlessfraud takes a look at Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture http://bit.ly/SnaIg # Censoring an Iranian Love Story http://bit.ly/2MbWzZ # Ha Jin talks about the mother of all mother-in-law stories http://bit.ly/ZD1k3 RT @GrantaMag # Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce http://bit.ly/pbaRb […]
After the revelations about the government’s plans to privatise higher education there was a storm of debate on the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza – no, not about education, about something called the Hausner plan. Unless I miss my guess this is the second plan to be named after this Hausner person. This one concerns public […]
– Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. # – O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words. # 9:15AM; “Kingstown pier,” Stephen said. “Yes, a disappointed bridge.” RT @UlyssesSeen # A good introduction to Joyce’s Ulysses, from the TMO archives, for Bloomsday http://bit.ly/G6MW5 # Bloomin’ […]
It’s June, so breaking a New Year’s resolution I return again to blog briefly about a book that I’ve just started – Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone. I couldn’t resist because of this wonderful passage on Italy – tying in nicely with BB Scimmia’s post of some time ago on Imagining Italy Madden’s narrator […]
Yesterday Gazeta Wyborcza announced plans by the government to stop paying for students to do two degrees – one’s your limit. Today’s paper lets the cat well and truly out of the bag. There’s an interview with professor Kazimierz Stępień, chairman of the Rada Nauki (Education Council, more or less) at the Ministry for Privatising […]
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 […]
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 […]
Poor Gordon Brown – he must look with no small amount of envy across Europe to Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi looks set to romp home in this weekend’s European Election vote with his Popolo della Liberta party expected to win somewhere around 40% of the vote (which combined with their righ-wing alliance partners the Lega […]