Cheap books
Looking for a cheap book? How about this one? With shipping, it will cost you a mere $1 billion. If you one of those cheap people, you can get Beeson’s Revelation here (scroll down) for free.
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Norah Lange: 45 días y 30 marineros [45 Days and 30 Sailors]
The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Norah Lange: 45 días y 30 marineros [45 Days and 30 Sailors], yet another Latin American novel that has not been translated into English. This is the story, based on an actual voyage Lange made, of a young woman (the real Lange was twenty-eight) travelling from … Read more
Top 100 most sought after out-of-print books in 2012
Bookfinder published a list of the Top 100 most sought after out-of-print books in 2012and a fairly grim list it is. I have read three – the Paul Gallico when I was about eleven, Allegory of Love when I was at university and The Act of Creation many many years ago and I own one … Read more
San Marino
The latest addition to my website is Milena Ercolani‘s Figlie della luna [Daughters of the Moon]. It is not a novel but rather a collection of short stories, nominally linked by a common theme (a feminist sensibility). Given that there is not much from San Marino, it is here but it really is not very … Read more
Rafael Chirbes: Crematorio [The Crematorium]
The latest addition to my website is Rafael Chirbes‘ Crematorio [The Crematorium]. Like La larga marcha [The Long March] and La caída de Madrid [The Fall of Madrid], this one is a portrait of Spain, this time set in the 1990s/early 2000s and shows the complete and utter corruption of the construction boom, as the … Read more
Anne Enright
The latest additions to my website are two Anne Enright novels. The first is What Are You Like?, an earlier novel. Frankly, this story of two young women looking for their origins did not really work for me. I found that, while Enright’s writing is, as always, superb, the plotting was somewhat unstructured and wooly … Read more
Shalom Auslander: Hope: A Tragedy
The latest addition to my website is Shalom Auslander‘s Hope: A Tragedy, one of the funniest books I have read in a long while. It is very politically incorrect, featuring a still alive but smelly and cantankerous Anne Frank, struggling to write a novel, a Jewish man whose fatal flaw is hope, his mother who … Read more
Burma
I have just returned from two weeks in Burma, where I saw the biggest book in the world (see photo at left). Other sites of literary interest included the Nationa Museum where they had samples of the handwriting of many Burmese writers, including Ma Ma Lay. I only have one Burmese book on my site … Read more
Sergio de la Pava: A Naked Singularity
The latest addition to my website is Sergio de la Pava‘s A Naked Singularity. This made some best-off lists for the end of last year but not enough. The fact that it was self-published in 2008, is nearly 700 pages long and written by a US author of Colombian origin with an Italian name may … Read more
Liam O’Flaherty: Land
The latest addition to my website is Liam O’Flaherty‘s Land. It is another novel set against the background of Irish history, in this case the disputes between landlords and tenants in the late nineteenth century, which gave rise to the formation of the Land League. It tells the story of the local Fenian group in … Read more