The latest addition to my website is Emile Habiby‘s فاء سعيد أبي النحس (The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist). The novel tells the story of Saeed,a Palestinian man, who works for the Israelis. He is almost killed during the Nakba in 1948, when Israelis fire at his family but, fortunately for him, a donkey … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ The World in the Attic. This book follows on from The Home Place. The two books are very similar, except that The Home Place contained photos. The book is about a visit of just under two days by Clyde Muncy (based on Morris), his wife, Peg, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is J M Coetzee‘s The Schooldays of Jesus, a follow on from his previous novel The Childhood of Jesus. As with this previous novel, the link with the biblical Jesus is not always apparent. Davíd, the presumably Jesus character, has been taken by his guardians, Inés and Simón, from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo del Moro [The Moor’s Camp]. This novel, the fourth book in Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series on the Spanish Civil War to be published, though the fifth in the series, is set during Fall of Madrid, which will end the Spanish Civil War. It opens on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Santiago Gamboa‘s Perder es cuestión de método [Losing is a Question of Method]. This is a detective novel, set in Bogota. Our hero is Victor Silanpa, a journalist. He learns of a body being found outside of Bogotá. The victim has been impaled. The police seem to be … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rober Racine‘s Le Mal de Vienne [The Vienna Sickness]. The author of this novel, Rober Racine, is primarily known as a visual artist. He is also a composer and dramatist but has written five novels. This work is an entirely absurdist and anarchic novel, written by a man … Read more
No, she hasn’t but I needed a catchy title that combined the two key literary events of the past couple of weeks and Bob Dylan unmasked definitely seemed like second best. So let’s start with Elena Ferrante. Many people have been very critical about the unmasking of her by Claudio Gatti. Jeanette Winterson, for example, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ivan Vladislavic‘s Double Negative. This is Vladislavic’s most recent novel and, while a fine work, not quite of the same standard of his earlier work. It is divided into three sections, the first set during apartheid in South Africa, the second just after the end of apartheid and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Bakhtiyar Ali‘s Ghazalnūs wa bāghakānı̄ khayāl (I Stared at the Night of the City). This is an absolutely brilliant, complex, long, magic realist novel, set in an unnamed Kurdish city but, presumably, the author’s home town of Slemani (Sulaymaniyah) . The basic theme if that kings need poets … Read more
No, this is not a joke. Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016. A lot of people are really not going to like this but I have always been impressed by Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Whether he is worthy of winning it over other US writers, such as Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol … Read more