The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment). This is a grim tale of life in Communist Romania. The narrator is on her second marriage, married to Paul, an alcoholic, who works in an engineering factory. She works in a clothing factory, a job she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gerald Murnane‘s A Lifetime on Clouds. This book, Murnane’s second novel, is, quite simply, about the masturbatory fantasies of an Australian teenager living in the poorer part of Melbourne in the 1950s. Adrian Sherd lives with his parents and two younger brothers. About four times a week, he … Read more
Kamila Shamsie has written what she calls a provocative article, about gender bias in publishing. I have dealt with this issue before – here, here and here. It has also, of course, been discussed in many other places. I do not know what prompted Shamsie to write her article now but it may well have … Read more
I spent last week in Budapest but was somewhat disappointed with the literary offerings. I asked around and found only only literary house/museum – the Petőfi Literary Museum, devoted to the poet Sándor Petőfi. Sándor Petőfi lived in the early nineteenth century, became a famous poet (actually making his living from poetry) and has since … Read more