Is Chuck Palahniuk one of America’s most underrated or overrated novelists? The answer to the question probably revolves around your attitude towards the shocking, because he is without doubt a novelist with the power to churn the stomach (although the reported faintings at readings of his short story ‘Guts’ seems exaggerated to me). Speaking to […]
Witold Gadomski of Gazeta Wyborcza is beginning to sound desperate. Today’s front page story in his newspaper is that the crisis is at hand. Ukraine and Hungary are in serious trouble and for foreign investors there is really no difference between all those East – sorry – Central European statelets. They’ll pull their money out […]
From a vast melting pot, its intensity so bewildering Fritz Lang may just be forced to gasp, a proud nightingale tired of the “Oh she’s Stevie Wonder’s lyricist isn’t she?” rhetoric rises, arms thurst wide, eyes glowing, messianic to the frickin’ hilt. This sleek slender Sappho like spectre hovers above sardine tin Northern Soul dancefloors, […]
Witold Gadomski is plainly relishing the opportunities the current financial troubles offer for a fight. Here he is in last weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza, telling us all to calm down, calm down. There is no cause for alarm. The system works. He quotes Stiglitz: “The fall of Wall Street has shown the world that a certain […]
Regular readers of Three Monkeys will know that we have a soft-spot for the Italian literary collective Wu Ming, the people behind novels like Q and 54 (which is very much on our ‘to-review’ list). Wu Ming I (there are five of them) has just published a thoughtful piece where he attempts to define what […]
The Mayoral election in Bologna next year was always going to have a certain national relevance, despite the city’s relatively small size. The very real possibility that a centre-right candidate could be elected by this ‘red’ city would obviously be another blow to Walter Veltroni’s opposition PD party. The relevance of the race was bolstered […]
Congratulations to Micahel Cronin and all at Routledge, who have put out Mr. Cronin’s book, Translation Goes to the Movies, bearing the date 2009. You can find it in bookshops already, three months before time. Then again, Cronin is so prolific it may have been a good idea to spread things out a little. Translation […]
I very rarely have the cause or inclination to browse to the Financial Times, but was glad to have done so today. The immediate reasoning was to check for news on the troubled bank of which I am, unfortunately, an account holder. No particular joy there, but instead I stumbled upon an extract from Margaret […]
A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work – or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of […]